Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous