"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He "liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the "Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race prejudice" was against the French.