Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also "mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.