The brutal Russian massacres of the Jews—Compares ancient and modern massacres—Tendency of present generation to turn its attention to war—Evil influence of the Bible upon children—Present God and religion will not last.
For two years, now, Christianity has been repeating, in Russia, the sort of industries in the way of massacre and mutilation with which it has been successfully persuading Christendom in every centuryⒶtextual note for nineteen hundred years, that it is the only right and [begin page 133] true religion—the one and only religion of peace and love. For two years, now, the ultra-Christian Government of Russia has been officially ordering and conducting massacres of its Jewish subjectsⒺexplanatory note. These massacres have been so frequent that we have become almost indifferent to them. The accounts of them hardly affect us more than do accounts of corners in a railroad stock in which we have no money invested. We have become so used to their described horrors that we hardly shudder now when we read of them.
Here are some of the particulars of one of the latest efforts of these humble twentieth centuryⒶtextual note disciples to persuade the unbeliever to come into the fold of the meek and gentle Savior.
Horrible details have been sent out by the correspondent of the Bourse Gazette, who arrived in BialystokⒺexplanatory note in company with Deputy Schepkin on Saturday, and who managed to send his story by a messenger Sunday afternoon. The correspondent, who accompanied Schepkin directly to the hospital escorted by a Corporal’s guard, says he was utterly unnerved by the sights he witnessed there.
“Merely saying that the bodies were mutilated,” the correspondent writes, “fails to describe the awful facts. The faces of the dead have lost all human resemblance. The body of Teacher Apstein lay on the grass with the hands tied. In the face and eyes had been hammered three-inch nails. Rioters entered his home, killing him thus, and then murdered the rest of his family of seven. When the body arrived at the hospital it was also marked with bayonet thrusts.
“Beside the body of Apstein lay that of a child of 10 years, whose leg had been chopped off with an axe. Here also were the dead from the Schlachter home, where, according to witnesses, soldiers came and plundered the house and killed the wife, son, and a neighbor’s daughter and seriously wounded Schlachter and his two daughters.
“I am told that soldiers entered the apartments of the Lapidus brothers, which were crowded with people who had fled from the streets for safety, and ordered the Christians to separate themselves from the Jews. A Christian student named Dikar protested and was killed on the spot. Then all of the Jews were shot.
“From the wounded in the hospital the correspondent heard many pitiable stories, all of the same general tenor. Here is the account of a badly wounded merchant named Nevyazhiky:
“ ‘I live in the suburbs. Learning of the pogrom, I tried to reach the town through the fields, but was intercepted by roughs. My brother was killed, my arm and leg were broken, my skull was fractured, and I was stabbed twice in the side. I fainted from loss of blood, and revived to find a soldier standing over me, who asked: “What, are you still alive! Shall I bayonet you?” I begged him to spare my life. The roughs again came, but spared me, saying: “He will die; let him suffer longer.” ’ ”
The correspondent, who adopts the bitterest tone toward the Government, holds that the pogrom undoubtedly was provoked, and attributes the responsibility to Police Lieutenant Sheremetieff. He declares that not only the soldiers, but their officers, participated, and that he himself was a witness as late as Saturday to the shooting down of a Jewish girl from the window of a hotel by Lieut. Miller of the Vladimir Regiment. The Governor of the Province of Grodno, who happened to be passing at the moment, ordered an investigation.
The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race’s steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit’s way—the optimist’s way.
Is there any discoverable advance toward moderation between the massacre of the AlbigensesⒺexplanatory note and these massacres of Russian Jews? There is one difference. In elaborate cruelty and brutality the modern massacre exceeds the ancient one. Is any advance discoverable between Bartholomew’s DayⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note and these Jewish massacres? Yes. The same difference again appears: theⒶtextual note modern Russian Christian and his Czar have advanced to an extravagance of bloody and bestial atrocity undreamed of by their crudeⒶtextual note brethren of three hundred and thirty-five years ago.
The Gospel of PeaceⒺexplanatory note is always making a good deal of noise with its mouth; always rejoicing in the progress it is making toward final perfection, and always diligently neglecting to furnish the statistics. George IIIⒶtextual note reigned sixty years, the longest reign in English history, up to his time. When his revered successor, Victoria, turned the sixty-year corner—thus scoring a new long-reign record—the event was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance and public rejoicing in EnglandⒺexplanatory note and her colonies. Among the statistics fetched out for general admiration were these: that for each year of the sixty of her reign, Victoria’s Christian soldiers had fought in a separate and distinct warⒺexplanatory note. Meantime, the possessions of England had swollen to such a degree, by depredations committed upon helpless and godlessⒶtextual note pagans, that there were not figures enough in Great Britain to set down the stolen acreage and they had to import a lot from other countries.
There are no peaceful nations now, except those unhappy ones whose borders have not been invaded by the Gospel of Peace. All Christendom is a soldier-campⒶtextual note. During all the past generation, the Christian poor have been taxed almost to starvation-pointⒶtextual note to support the giant armaments which the Christian Governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the brotherhood and, incidentally, toⒶtextual note snatch any patch of real estate left exposed by its savage owner. King Leopold IIⒶtextual note of Belgium—probably the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VIⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note, that has escaped hellⒶtextual note thus far—has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population of thirty millions to fifteen, by murder, mutilation, overwork, robbery, rapine—confiscating the helpless native’s very labor, and giving him nothing in return but salvation and a home in heavenⒶtextual note, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest.
Within this last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer, and more and more effective ways of killing Christians—and, incidentally, a pagan now and then—and the surest way to get rich quickly, in Christ’s earthly kingdom,Ⓐtextual note is to invent a gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing gun.
Also, during the same generation, each Christian Government has played with its neighbors a continuous poker game, in the naval line. In this game France putsⒶtextual note up a battleship;Ⓐtextual note England sees that battleshipⒶtextual note, and goes it one battleshipⒶtextual note better;Ⓐtextual note Russia comes in and raises it a battleshipⒶtextual note or two—did, before the untaught stranger entered the game and reduced her stately pile of chips to a damaged ferry-boat and a cruiser that can’t [begin page 135] cruise. We are in it, ourselves, nowⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐtextual note This game goes on, and on, and on. There is never a new shuffle; never a new deal. No player ever calls another’s hand. It is merely an unending game of put up, and put up, and put up; and by the law of probabilities, a day is coming when no Christians will be left on the land, exceptⒶtextual note the women. The men will be all at sea, manning the fleets.
This singular game, which is so costly and so ruinous, and so silly,Ⓐtextual note is called statesmanship—which is different from assmanship on account of the spelling. Anybody but a statesman could invent some way to reduce these vast armaments to rational and sensible and safe police proportions, with the result that thenceforth all Christians could sleep in their beds unafraid, and even the Savior could come down and walk onⒶtextual note the seas, foreigner as HeⒶtextual note is, without dread of being chased by Christian battleshipsⒶtextual note.
Has the Bible done something still worse than drench the planet with innocent blood? To my mind it has—but this is only an opinion, and it may be a mistaken one. There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled. No Protestant child ever comes clean from association with the Bible. This association cannot be prevented. Sometimes the parents try to prevent it, by not allowing the children to have access to the Bible’s awful obscenities, but this only whets the child’s desire to taste that forbidden fruit, and it does taste it—seeks it out secretly and devours it with a strong and grateful appetite. The Bible does its baleful work in the propagation of vice among children, and vicious and unclean ideas, daily and constantly, in every Protestant family in Christendom. It does more of this deadly work than all the other unclean books in Christendom put together; and not only more, but a thousand-foldⒶtextual note more. It is easy to protect the young from those other books, and they are protected from them. But they have no protection against the deadly Bible.
Is it doubted that the young people hunt out the forbidden passages privately, and study them with pleasure? If my reader were here present—let him be of either sex or any age, between ten and ninety—I would make him answer thisⒶtextual note question himselfⒶtextual note—and he could answer it in only one way. He would be obliged to say that by his own knowledge and experience of the days of his early youth, he knows positively that the Bible defiles all Protestant children, without a single exception.
Do I think the Christian religion is here to stay? Why should I think so?Ⓐtextual note There had been a thousand religions before it was born. They are all dead. There had been millions of gods before ours was invented. Swarms of them are dead and forgotten long ago. Ours is by long odds the worst God that the ingenuity of man has begotten from his insane imagination—and shall He and His Christianity be immortal,Ⓐtextual note against the great array of probabilities furnished by the theological history of the past? No. I think that Christianity, and its God, must follow the rule. They must pass on, in their turn, and make room for another God and a stupiderⒶtextual note religion. Or perhaps aⒶtextual note better than this? No. That is not likely. History shows that in the matter of religions, we progress backward, and not the other way. No matter, thereⒶtextual note will be a new God and a new religion. They will be introduced to popularity and acceptance with the only arguments that have ever persuaded any people in this earth to adopt Christianity, or any other religion that they were [begin page 136] not born to:Ⓐtextual note the Bible, the sword, the torch, and the axe—the only missionaries that have ever scored a single victory since gods and religions began in the world. After the new God and the new religion have become established in the usual proportions—one-fifth of the world’s population ostensible adherents,Ⓐtextual note the four-fifths pagan missionary field, with the missionary scratching its continental back complacently and inefficiently—will the new converts believe in them? Certainly they will. They have always believed in the million gods and religions that have been stuffed down their midriffs. There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it. At this very day there are thousands upon thousands of Americans of average intelligence who fully believe in “Science and Health,” although they can’t understand a line of it, and who also worship the sordid and ignorant old purloiner of that gospel—Mrs. Mary Baker G. EddyⒺexplanatory note, whom they do absolutely believe to be a member, by adoption, of the Holy Family, and on the way to push the Savior to third place and assume occupancy of His present place, and continue that occupancy during the rest of eternity.
For two years, now . . . the ultra-Christian Government of Russia has been officially ordering and conducting massacres of its Jewish subjects] In the early years of the century, the government of Tsar Nicholas II (who ruled from 1894 to 1918) promoted vicious anti-Semitism. In April 1903, at the instigation of both high-level and local officials, violence erupted in Kishinev at Passover. A Christian mob with the backing of the police and the army murdered about fifty Jews and injured five hundred. Thereafter the government participated in numerous pogroms, one of which occurred in Kishinev in October 1905, when rioters killed about twenty Jews.
Horrible details have been sent out by the correspondent of the Bourse Gazette, who arrived in Bialystok] Clemens had a clipping of this portion of the article, from the New York Times of 19 June, pasted into the typescript of this dictation. The pogroms of June 1906 in Bialystok (now in northeastern Poland), abetted both by local police and by higher authorities, resulted in the murder of as many as two hundred Jews.
massacre of the Albigenses] The Albigenses were members of a medieval religious sect in southern France, concentrated in the area of Albi. They were ascetics who practiced chastity and vegetarianism. Their exact creed is unclear, since it is described primarily by their enemies, but some of their doctrines were apparently of non-Christian origin, and they were persecuted by the Catholic Church as heretics. In 1208 Pope Innocent III ordered a crusade against them, in which many people were slaughtered, regardless of age, sex, or creed. The crusade led to an official Inquisition, and the sect became extinct.
Bartholomew’s Day] On 24 August 1572, the feast of Saint Bartholomew, a group of Huguenot (Calvinist Protestant) leaders were assassinated in Paris at the instigation of Catherine de’ Medici, mother of King Charles IX. These assassinations triggered a growing massacre, which during the following week spread to the provinces, where over the next two months Catholic mobs murdered thousands of Huguenots.
The Gospel of Peace] Romans 10:15 (paraphrasing Isaiah 52:7): “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace.”
George III reigned sixty years . . . public rejoicing in England] George III (1738–1820) reigned from 1760 until his death. Clemens witnessed Queen Victoria’s celebration of her Record Reign and Diamond Jubilee in London in June 1897, and wrote three newspaper reports about it ( AutoMT1 , 501 n. 126.19).
for each year of the sixty of her reign . . . a separate and distinct war] The London Standard noted that during Victoria’s sixty years on the throne “it would be possible to name sixty nations or races over whom the Queen’s arms have triumphed; they have varied from civilised and powerful States to the naked savages of Africa and the Southern Seas, and these wars have been rewarded with an immense addition of territory and influence” (“The Queen’s Wars,” 22 June 1897, 2). Another news item, started by the radical Reynolds’s Newspaper and widely reprinted in America, enumerated forty-two wars, from the Afghan War (1838–40) to the Bombardment of the Cretan Christians (1897) (“Always at War,” 28 Feb 1897, 1).
Alexander VI] Pope Alexander VI (born Rodrigo Borgia, 1431–1503) was infamous for his corruption and moral turpitude. He imprisoned and murdered his enemies to confiscate their wealth, and gave away the church’s assets to the children he fathered with several mistresses.
each Christian Government has played with its neighbors . . . We are in it, ourselves, now] In the late 1880s the major European powers began to build up their navies, increasing their production of battleships in an effort to intimidate the enemy and deter aggression. By the fall of 1905 Britain had in service, or under construction, sixty-six battleships; France had forty; and Germany had thirty-seven. The Russian fleet, however, had been reduced from twenty-seven to ten by what Clemens calls the “untaught stranger” (Japan) in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. In 1906 Britain commissioned the Dreadnought, an innovative warship whose size, speed, and gun power made earlier models obsolete. The United States adopted the new design, immediately undertaking the construction of two battleships. This naval arms race significantly increased the tensions that led to the First World War (Sondhaus 2002, 102–8, 127, 131–35; Spears 1908, 305).
“Science and Health” . . . Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy] The Church of Christ, Scientist, is a denomination based on the theories set forth in Science and Health (1875) by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). According to its tenets, material life is illusory, and only the spiritual realm is real; therefore disease is imaginary, and through Christian faith people can be healed. Clemens both praised and criticized Eddy. He believed to some extent in the curative power of the mind and acknowledged her organizational ability, but he found her writings ludicrous and largely incoherent, and possibly authored by someone else. Furthermore, he denounced her as a hypocritical and power-hungry fraud and deplored the growing popularity of her theology. Clemens owned (or at least consulted) as many as six different editions of Science and Health, ranging in date from 1881 to 1902; volume 2 of the 1884 edition, with his sparse marginalia, survives in the Mark Twain Papers (Eddy 1884; WIM, 271, 293, 339, 554–55, 575). He first attacked Christian Science in an article in Cosmopolitan in 1899, and again in the North American Review in 1902–3. These articles were expanded and published as Christian Science in 1907 (SLC 1899c, 1902c, 1903b, 1903c, 1903d, 1907a). His views did not, however, deter his only surviving daughter, Clara, from becoming a Christian Scientist after experiencing more than one “miraculous” cure. In 1956 she described her conversion, and explained her father’s views on Eddy, in Awake to a Perfect Day (CC 1956). Clemens returns to the subject in the Autobiographical Dictations of 5 October and 27 December 1906. For comprehensive discussions of the matter see: WIM, 20–28, 553–77; Stoneley 1992, 116–45; Wills’s “Introduction: Twain and Eddy” and Hill’s “Afterword” in SLC 1996a; see also Gribben 1980, 1:212–13.
Source documents.
TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 929–37 (altered in pencil to 954–62), made from Hobby’s notes and revised.Times Clipping from the New York Times, 19 June 1906, 3, attached to TS1: ‘Horrible details . . . an investigation.’ (133.11–46).
TS2, which is now missing, presumably incorporated Clemens’s TS1 revisions.