I record it here, and preserve it from oblivion, as the briefest and best “valedictory” that has yet come under my notice.
Mark Twain.
P. S.--I am grateful for the kindly way in which the press of the land have taken notice of my irruption into regular journalistic life, telegraphically or editorially, and am happy in this place to express the feeling.
II
A TRIBUTE TO ANSON BURLINGAME
(February, 1870)
On Wednesday, in St. Petersburg, Mr. Burlingame died after a short illness. It is not easy to comprehend, at an instant’s warning, the exceeding magnitude of the loss which mankind sustains in this death--the loss which all nations and all peoples sustain in it. For he had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state and become a citizen of the world; and his charity was large enough and his great heart warm enough to feel for all its races and to labor for them. He was a true man, a brave man, an earnest man, a liberal man, a just man, a generous man, in all his ways and by all his instincts a noble man; he was a man of education and culture, a finished conversationalist, a ready, able, and graceful speaker, a man of great brain, a broad and deep and weighty thinker. He was a great man--a very, very great man. He was imperially endowed by nature; he was faithfully befriended by circumstances, and he wrought gallantly always, in whatever station he found himself.
He was a large, handsome man, with such a face as children instinctively trust in, and homeless and friendless creatures appeal to without fear. He was courteous at all times and to all people, and he had the rare and winning faculty of being always interested in whatever a man had to say--a faculty which he possessed simply because nothing was trivial to him which any man or woman or child had at heart. When others said harsh things about even unconscionable and intrusive bores after they had retired from his presence, Mr. Burlingame often said a generous word in their favor, but never an unkind one.
A chivalrous generosity was his most marked characteristic--a large charity, a noble kindliness that could not comprehend narrowness or meanness. It is this that shows out in his fervent abolitionism, manifested at a time when it was neither very creditable nor very safe to hold such a creed; it was this that prompted him to hurl his famous Brooks-and-Sumner speech in the face of an astonished South at a time when all the North was smarting under the sneers and taunts and material aggressions of admired and applauded Southerners. It was this that made him so warmly espouse the cause of Italian liberty--an espousal so pointed and so vigorous as to attract the attention of Austria, which empire afterward declined to receive him when he was appointed Austrian envoy by Mr. Lincoln. It was this trait which prompted him to punish Americans in China when they imposed upon the Chinese. It was this trait which moved him, in framing treaties, to frame them in the broad interest of the world, instead of selfishly seeking to acquire advantages for his own country alone and at the expense of the other party to the treaty, as had always before been the recognized “diplomacy.” It was this trait which was and is the soul of the crowning achievements of his career, the treaties with America and England in behalf of China. In every labor of this man’s life there was present a good and noble motive; and in nothing that he ever did or said was there anything small or base. In real greatness, ability, grandeur of character, and achievement, he stood head and shoulders above all the Americans of to-day, save one or two.
Without any noise, or any show, or any flourish, Mr. Burlingame did a score of things of shining mark during his official residence in China. They were hardly heard of away here in America. When he first went to China, he found that with all their kingly powers, American envoys were still not of much consequence in the eyes of their countrymen of either civil or official position. But he was a man who was always “posted.” He knew all about the state of things he would find in China before he sailed from America. And so he took care to demand and receive additional powers before he turned his back upon Washington. When the customary consular irregularities placidly continued and he notified those officials that such irregularities must instantly cease, and they inquired with insolent flippancy what the consequence might be in case they did not cease, he answered blandly that he would dismiss them, from the highest to the lowest! (He had quietly come armed with absolute authority over their official lives.) The consular irregularities ceased. A far healthier condition of American commercial interests ensued there.
To punish a foreigner in China was an unheard-of thing. There was no way of accomplishing it. Each Embassy had its own private district or grounds, forced from the imperial government, and into that sacred district Chinese law officers could not intrude. All foreigners guilty of offenses against Chinamen were tried by their own countrymen, in these holy places, and as no Chinese testimony was admitted, the culprit almost always went free. One of the very first things Mr. Burlingame did was to make a Chinaman’s oath as good as a foreigner’s; and in his ministerial court, through Chinese and American testimony combined, he very shortly convicted a noted American ruffian of murdering a Chinaman. And now a community accustomed to light sentences were naturally startled when, under Mr. Burlingame’s hand, and bearing the broad seal of the American Embassy, came an order to take him out and hang him!