the present emergency. I would have the Anti-Doughnuts felt in every city
and hamlet and school district in this State and in the United States.
I was an Anti-Doughnut in my boyhood, and I’m an Anti-Doughnut still.
The modern designation is Mugwump. There used to be quite a number of us
Mugwumps, but I think I’m the only one left. I had a vote this fall, and
I began to make some inquiries as to what I had better do with it.
I don’t know anything about finance, and I never did, but I know some
pretty shrewd financiers, and they told me that Mr. Bryan wasn’t safe on
any financial question. I said to myself, then, that it wouldn’t do for
me to vote for Bryan, and I rather thought–I know now–that McKinley
wasn’t just right on this Philippine question, and so I just didn’t vote
for anybody. I’ve got that vote yet, and I’ve kept it clean, ready to
deposit at some other election. It wasn’t cast for any wildcat financial
theories, and it wasn’t cast to support the man who sends our boys as
volunteers out into the Philippines to get shot down under a polluted
flag.
MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT
ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ST. NICHOLAS SOCIETY, NEW YORK,
DECEMBER 6, 1900
Doctor Mackay, in his response to the toast “St. Nicholas,”
referred to Mr. Clemens, saying: –“Mark Twain is as true a
preacher of true righteousness as any bishop, priest, or
minister of any church to-day, because he moves men to forget
their faults by cheerful well-doing instead of making them sour
and morbid by everlastingly bending their attention to the
seamy and sober side of life.”
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ST. NICHOLAS SOCIETY,–These are,
indeed, prosperous days for me. Night before last, in a speech, the
Bishop of the Diocese of New York complimented me for my contribution to
theology, and to-night the Reverend Doctor Mackay has elected me to the
ministry. I thanked Bishop Potter then for his compliment, and I thank
Doctor Mackay now for that promotion. I think that both have discerned
in me what I long ago discerned, but what I was afraid the world would
never learn to recognize.
In this absence of nine years I find a great improvement in the city of
New York. I am glad to speak on that as a toast–“The City of New York.”
Some say it has improved because I have been away. Others, and I agree
with them, say it has improved because I have come back. We must judge
of a city, as of a man, by its external appearances and by its inward
character. In externals the foreigner coming to these shores is more
impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not
done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The
foreigner is shocked by them.
In the daylight they are ugly. They are–well, too chimneyfied and too
snaggy–like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist; like a cemetery
that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the
river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with
light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul
and more enchanting than anything that man has dreamed of since the
Arabian nights. We can’t always have the beautiful aspect of things.
Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others
go. When your foreigner makes disagreeable comments on New York by
daylight, float him down the river at night.
What has made these sky-scrapers possible is the elevator. The cigar-box
which the European calls a “lift” needs but to be compared with our
elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors.
That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American
elevator acts like the man’s patent purge–it worked. As the inventor
said, “This purge doesn’t waste any time fooling around; it attends
strictly to business.”
That New-Yorkers have the cleanest, quickest, and most admirable system
of street railways in the world has been forced upon you by the abnormal