Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco papers.