ared nothing in his picture of
them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine
publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued
as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would
gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that
unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was
price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold
went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo,
a domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the ward
of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen
nations, America and thirteen European states. Leopold promptly seized
the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found
themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever
committed by an assemblage of civilized people.]

Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and Clemens
worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and
exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized
and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His interest did
not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared: "I have said
all I can say on that terrible subject. I am heart and soul in any
movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot write
any more."

His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely. His
final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold when
time should have claimed him. It ran:

Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell
of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages
after all the Caesars and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased
to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium.

Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the
Philippines, and in his letters to Twichell he did not hesitate to
criticize the President's attitude in this and related matters. Once,
in a moment of irritation, he wrote:

DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the
President. If I could only find the words to define it with! Here
they are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome:

"For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated
Roosevelt the statesman and politician."

It's mighty