not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. "It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _exposé_ of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a Mephistopheles. With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and "A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against bull-fighting in Spain.