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[To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford]
D
J,—It is another off day, but tomorrow I shall
resume work to a certainty, and bid a long farewell to letter-scribbling.
The news of the President looks decidedly
hopeful, and we are all glad, and the household faces are much improved,
as to cheerfulness. Oh, the talk in the newspapers! Evidently
the Human Race is the same old Human Race. And how unjust, and unreflectingly
discriminating, the talkers are. Under the unsettling effects of
powerful emotion the talkers are saying wild things, crazy things—they
are out of themselves, and do not know it; they are temporarily
insane, yet with one voice they declare the assassin sane—a
man who has been entertaining fiery and reason-debauching maggots
in his head for weeks and months. Why, no one is sane, straight
along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities
are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms—fortunately
harmless forms as a rule—but in whatever form they occur an immense
upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the
sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to
be of the murderous kind we must look out—and so must the spectator.
This ass with the unpronounceable
name was probably more insane than usual this week or two back,
and may get back upon his bearings by and by, but he was over the
sanity-border when he shot the President. It is pos- [713][714]
sible that it has taken him the whole interval since the murder
of the King of Italy to get insane enough to attempt the President’s
life. Without a doubt some thousands of men have been meditating
the same act in the same interval, but new and strong interests
have intervened and diverted their over-excited minds long enough
to give them a chance to settle, and tranquilize, and get back upon
a healthy level again. Every extraordinary occurrence unsettles
the heads of hundreds of thousands of men for a few moments or hours
or days. If there had been ten kings around when Humbert fell they
would have been in great peril for a day or more—and from men in
whose presence they would have been quite safe after the excess
of their excitement had had an interval in which to cool down. I
bought a revolver once and travelled twelve hundred miles to kill
a man. He was away. He was gone a day. With nothing else to do,
I had to stop and think—and did. Within an hour—within half
of it—I was ashamed of myself—and felt unspeakably ridiculous. I
do not know what to call it if I was not insane. During a whole
week my head was in a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting
enough to upset a stronger reason than mine.
All over the world, every day, there
are some millions of men in that condition temporarily. And in that
time there is always a moment—perhaps only a single one—when they
would do murder if their man was at hand. If the opportunity comes
a shade too late, the chances are that it has come permanently too
late. Opportunity seldom comes exactly at the supreme moment. This
saves a million lives a day in the world—for sure.
No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous
details of it are ravenously devoured by a hundred thousand men
whose minds dwell, unaware, near the temporary-insanity frontier—and
over they go, now! There is a day—two days—three—during which no
Ruler would be safe from perhaps the half of them; and there is
a single moment wherein he would not be safe from any of them, no
doubt. [714][715]
It may take this present shooting-case
six months to breed another ruler-tragedy, but it will breed it.
There is at least one mind somewhere which will brood, and wear,
and decay itself to the killing-point and produce that tragedy.
Every negro burned at the stake unsettles
the excitable brain of another one—I mean the inflaming details
of his crime, and the lurid theatricality of his exit do it—and
the duplicate crime follows; and that begets a repetition, and that
one another one—and so on. Every lynching-account unsettles the
brains of another set of excitable white men, and lights another
pyre—115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8 months this year;
in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.
Yes, the wild talk you see in the
papers! And from men who are sane when not upset by overwhelming
excitement. A U. S. Senator—Cullom—wants this Buffalo criminal lynched!
It would breed other lynchings—of men who are not dreaming of committing
murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom will keep quiet and
not provide the exciting cause.
And a District Attorney wants a law
which shall punish with death attempts upon a President’s
life—this, mind you, as a deterrent. It would have no effect—or
the opposite one. The lunatic’s mind-space is all occupied—as
mine was—with the matter in hand; there is no room in it for reflections
upon what may happen to him. That comes after the crime.
It is the noise the attempt
would make in the world that would breed the subsequent attempts,
by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy the criminal his
vast notoriety—his obscure name tongued by stupendous Kings and
Emperors—his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest details
of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps, what
he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty thousand
dollars a day—and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!—like the
assassin of the President of France—in debt [715][716]
three francs to his landlady, and insulted by her—and to-day she
is proud to be able to say she knew him “as familiarly as you know
your own brother,” and glad to stand till she drops and pour out
columns and pages of her grandeur and her happiness upon the eager
interviewer.
Nothing will check the lynchings and
ruler-murder but absolute silence—the absence of pow-pow about them.
How are you going to manage that? By gagging every witness and jamming
him into a dungeon for life; by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating
all newspaper men; and by extinguishing God’s most elegant invention,
the Human Race. It is quite simple, quite easy, and I hope you will
take a day off and attend to it, Joe.
I blow a kiss to you, and am
Lovingly Yours,
M.
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