Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

Cabinet had arrived. He said they had, and I entered. They were all

there; but nobody offered me a seat. They stared at me as if I had been

an intruder. The President said:

“Well, sir, who are you?”

I handed him my card, and he read: “The HON. MARK TWAIN, Clerk of the

Senate Committee on Conchology.” Then he looked at me from head to foot,

as if he had never heard of me before. The Secretary of the Treasury

said:

“This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and

conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac.”

The Secretary of War said: “It is the same visionary that came to me

yesterday with a scheme to educate a portion of the Indians to death,

and massacre the balance.”

The Secretary of the Navy said: “I recognize this youth as the person who

has been interfering with my business time and again during the week. He

is distressed about Admiral Farragut’s using a whole fleet for a pleasure

excursion, as he terms it. His proposition about some insane pleasure

excursion on a raft is too absurd to repeat.”

I said: ” Gentlemen, I perceive here a disposition to throw discredit

upon every act of my official career; I perceive, also, a disposition to

debar me from all voice in the counsels of the nation. No notice

whatever was sent to me to-day. It was only by the merest chance that I

learned that there was going to be a Cabinet meeting. But let these

things pass. All I wish to know is, is this a Cabinet meeting or is it

not?”

The President said it was.

“Then,” I said, “let us proceed to business at once, and not fritter away

valuable time in unbecoming fault-findings with each other’s official

conduct.”

The Secretary of State now spoke up, in his benignant way, and said,

“Young man, you are laboring under a mistake. The clerks of the

Congressional committees are not members of the Cabinet. Neither are the

doorkeepers of the Capitol, strange as it may seem. Therefore, much as

we could desire your more than human wisdom in our deliberations, we

cannot lawfully avail ourselves of it. The counsels of the nation must

proceed without you; if disaster follows, as follow full well it may, be

it balm to your sorrowing spirit that by deed and voice you did what in

you lay to avert it. You have my blessing. Farewell.”

These gentle words soothed my troubled breast, and I went away. But the

servants of a nation can know no peace. I had hardly reached my den in

the Capitol, and disposed my feet on the table like a representative,

when one of the Senators on the Conchological Committee came in in a

passion and said:

“Where have you been all day?”

I observed that, if that was anybody’s affair but my own, I had been to a

Cabinet meeting.

“To a Cabinet meeting? I would like to know what business you had at a

Cabinet meeting?”

I said I went there to consult–allowing for the sake of argument that he

was in any wise concerned in the matter. He grew insolent then, and

ended by saying he had wanted me for three days past to copy a report on

bomb-shells, egg-shells, clamshells, and I don’t know what all, connected

with conchology, and nobody had been able to find me.

This was too much. This was the feather that broke the clerical camel’s

back. I said, “Sir, do you suppose that I am going to work for six

dollars a day? If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate

Committee on Conchology to hire somebody else. I am the slave of no

faction! Take back your degrading commission. Give me liberty, or give

me death!”

From that hour I was no longer connected with the government. Snubbed by

the department, snubbed by the Cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman

of a committee I was endeavoring to adorn, I yielded to persecution, cast

far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my

bleeding country in the hour of her peril.