official
report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last
year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present
conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to
take care of our railroad business. But it is characteristically
American--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages.

A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric
Russia. Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote:

It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that
deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest &
peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan,
or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference--if they have a
preference.

An article, "The Tsar's Soliloquy," written at this time, was published
in the North American Review for March (1905). He wrote much more, but
most of the other matter he put aside. On a subject like that he always
discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about
three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. "The
Soliloquy," however, is severe enough. It represents the Tsar as
contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor
human specimen he presents:

Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and
worship?--manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle which
is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately,
none knows better than I: it is my clothes! Without my clothes I
should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No
one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. Then who is the
real Emperor of Russia! My clothes! There is no other.

The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties
that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian
imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to
something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote
"King Leopold's Soliloquy," the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who
had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in his
greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he
had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields. Seldom in the
history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of
King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens sp