The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: "in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of industry. Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the recognized American game according to the recognized American rules.