The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led him to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for international copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this petition.
I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally to
every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the
signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one
thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but
in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of better
and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at. I will
ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should
ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush, but
still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go on stealing from
us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, “American lawmakers do steal, but
not from foreign authors—not from foreign authors,”.... If we only
had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to
get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled.—[For the petition concerning copyright term in the United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end of last volume.]
CIII. “ATLANTIC” DAYS
It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. His paper on “Universal Suffrage” had sounded a first note, and his copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to say that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, “The Curious Republic of Gondour.” In this article was developed the idea that the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where this plan had been established:
It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which
authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be
specified by statute....
The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under
it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so
universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good
common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school
education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value
of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty
thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to
another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,
even though he owned no property.
The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was the author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name, as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.
Howells urged him to follow up the “Gondour” paper; to send some more reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other things by that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.
He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car line had recently adopted the “punch system,” and posted in its cars, for the information of passengers and conductor, this placard: