out his bit of leopard-skin to awe and impress the people, he would not be able to keep his job.

[After a silence.] A curious invention, an unaccountable invention-the human race! The swarming Russian millions have for centuries meekly allowed our Family to rob them, insult them, trample them under foot, while they lived and suffered and died with no purpose and no function but to make that Family comfortable! These people are horses-just that-horses with clothes and a religion. A horse with the strength of a hundred men will let one man beat him, starve him, drive him; the Russian millions allow a mere handful of soldiers to hold them in slavery-and these very soldiers are their own sons and brothers!

A strange thing, when one considers it: to wit, the world applies to Czar and System the same moral axioms that have vogue and acceptance in civilized countries! Because, in civilized countries, it is wrong to remove oppressors otherwise than by process of law, it is held that the same rule applies in Russia, where there is no such thing as law-except for our Family. Laws are merely restraints they have no other function. In civilized countries they restrain all persons, and restrain them all alike, which is fair and righteous; but in Russia such laws as exist make an exception-our Family. We do as we please; we have done as we pleased for centuries. Our common trade has been crime, our common pastime murder, our common beverage blood-the blood of the nation. Upon our heads lie millions of murders. Yet the pious moralist says it is a crime to assassinate us. We and our uncles are a family of cobras set over a hundred and forty million rabbits, whom we torture and murder and feed upon all our days; yet the moralist urges that to kill us is a crime, not a duty.

It is not for me to say it aloud, but to one on the inside-like me-this is naïvely funny; on its face, illogical. Our Family is above all law; there is no law that can reach us, restrain us, protect the people from us. Therefore, we are outlaws. Outlaws are a proper mark for any one's bullet. Ah! what could our Family do without the moralist? He has always been our stay, our support, our friend; to-day he is our only friend. Whenever there has been dark talk of assassination, he has come forward and saved us with his impressive maxim, " Forbear: nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved by violence." He probably believes it. It is because he has by him no child's book of world

history to teach him that his maxim lacks the backing of statistics. All thrones have been established by violence; no regal tyranny has ever been overthrown except by violence; by violence my fathers set up our throne; by murder, treachery, perjury, torture, banishment and the prison they have held it for four centuries, and by these same arts I hold it to-day. There is no Romanoff of learning and experience but would reverse the maxim and say: "Nothing politically valuable was ever yet achieved except by violence." The moralist realizes that to-day, for the first time in our history, my throne is in real peril and the nation waking up from its immemorial slave-lethargy; but he does not perceive that four deeds of violence are the reason for it: the assassination of the Finland Constitution by my hand; the slaughter, by revolutionary assassins, of Bobrikoff and Plehve; and my massacre of the unoffending innocents the other day. But the blood that flows in my veins-blood informed, trained, educated by its grim heredities, blood alert by its traditions, blood which has been to school four hundred years in the veins of professional assassins, my predecessors-it perceives, it understands! Those four deeds have set up a commotion in the inert and muddy deeps of the national heart such as no moral suasion could have accomplished; they have aroused hatred and hope in that long-atrophied heart; and, little by little, slowly but surely, that feeling will steal into every breast and possess it. In time, into even the soldier's breast-fatal day, day of doom, that! . . . . By and by, there will be results! How little the academical moralist knows of the tremendous moral force of massacre and assassination! . . . Indeed there are going to be results! The nation is in labor; and by and by there will be a mighty birth-PATRIOTISM! To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words-true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty, not to a Family and a Fiction, but loyalty to the Nation itself!

There are twenty-five million families in Russia. There is a man-child at every mother's knee. If these were twenty-five million patriotic mothers, they would teach these man-children daily, saying: "Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." With twenty-five million

taught and trained patriots in the land a generation from now, my successor would think twice before he would butcher a thousand helpless poor petitioners humbly begging for his kindness and justice, as I did the other day.

[Reflective pause.] Well, perhaps I have been affected by these depressing newspaper-clippings which I found under my pillow. I will read and ponder them again. [Reads.].

[Moved.] How shameful! . . how pitiful! . . . . And how grotesque! . . . . To think-it was I that did those cruel things. . . . There is no escaping the personal responsibility-it was I that did them. And it was I that got that grovelling and awe-smitten worship! I-this thing in the mirror-this carrot! With one hand I flogged unoffending women to death and tortured prisoners to unconsciousness; and with the other I held up the fetish toward my fellow deity in heaven and called down His blessing upon my adoring animals whom, and whose forbears, with His holy approval, I and mine have been instructing in the pains of hell for four lagging centuries. It is a picture! To think that this thing in the mirror-this vegetable is an accepted deity to a mighty nation, an innumerable host, and nobody laughs; and at the same time is a diligent and practical professional devil, and nobody marvels, nobody murmurs about incongruities and inconsistencies! Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do? Has it no respect for itself? . . . . I think my respect for it is drooping, sinking—and my respect for myself along with it. . . . There is but one restorative Clothes! respect-reviving, spirit-uplifting clothes! heaven's kindliest gift to man, his only protection against finding himself out: they deceive him, they confer dignity upon him; without them he has none. How charitable are clothes, how beneficent, how puissant, how inestimably precious! Mine are able to expand a human cipher into a globe-shadowing portent; they can command the respect of the whole world-including my own, which is fading. I will put them on.

MARK TWAIN.

February 2, 1905.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND TIBERIUS

GRACCHUS.

BY CHARLES S. DANA.

IF one were to search the recorded doings of ancient and modern man with a view to finding a prototype of President Roosevelt, one's efforts would be, in a measure, rewarded on reaching the chapter devoted to Tiberius Gracchus. In birth, education, early environment, culture, ambition, even in temperament and character, there is a close resemblance between the ancient Tiberius and the modern Theodore. So striking is this resemblance that it suggests the possibility that Roosevelt may have taken the elder of the Gracchi as his model and kept the sturdy Tribune's aims and achievements constantly in mind during his own course along the pathway to distinction.

Tiberius was of noble, Theodore of gentle, birth. Both had in youth all the advantages that wealth and refined surroundings offer. Both developed a highly moral character. Both received an excellent degree of education. Both at an early age began to show an interest in public affairs. Both became thoroughly familiar with the history of their respective countries, and each, apparently, was convinced that a great and important task lay before him. In the methods by which each approached his task and, to a certain extent, in the tasks themselves, there is much similarity. Though related by birth and by marriage to people who are sometimes rather snobbishly called "the better classes," and associated with them in childhood and young manhood, both Tiberius and Theodore became essentially champions of the people and, later in life, antagonized-Tiberius very bitterly, and Theodore as yet only mildly-some of the more prosperous persons of their day and generation.

Nor does the parallel end here. Tiberius, as well as Theodore,