me and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five and
thirty years.

I am coming to see you and Mrs. Doubleday by and bye. She loved and
honored Mrs. Doubleday and her work.

Always yours,
MARK.

It was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics.
Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political
situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense
of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general.
Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when
all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in
outspoken and rather somber protest.

*****

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04.

Oh, dear! get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe. At least
with your mouth. We hail only two men who could make speeches for their
parties and preserve their honor and their dignity. One of them is dead.
Possibly there were four. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed.
And yet I know he couldn't help it. He wears the collar, and he had to
pay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before
a mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had.
Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history,
concealing facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordid
side of human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, and
he had to climb away down and do it.

It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles which
party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. Look
at McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless
in character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning
trickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of
the meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the
condoning of crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political
life the reverse of all this.

McKinley was a silverite--you concealed it. Roosevelt was a
silverite--you concealed it. Parker was a silverite--you publish it.
Along with a shudder and a warning: "He was unsafe then. Is he any safer
now?"

Joe, even I could be guilty of such a thing as that--if I were in
party-politics; I really believe it.

Mr. Cleveland gave