Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In 1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a member. His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, "Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous