Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill:

The United States of America in account with

the Hon. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, Dr.

To consultation with Secretary of War ………… $50

To consultation with Secretary of Navy ……….. $50

To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury … $50

Cabinet consultation ……………….No charge.

To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,

Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,

14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile …………. $2,800

To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee

on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day ……….. $36

Total …………………….. $2,986

–[Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go

back when they get here once. Why my mileage is denied me is more than I

can understand.]

Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty-six

dollars for clerkship salary. The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me

to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked

in the margin “Not allowed.” So, the dread alternative is embraced at

last. Repudiation has begun! The nation is lost.

I am done with official life for the present. Let those clerks who are

willing to be imposed on remain. I know numbers of them in the

departments who are never informed when there is to be a Cabinet meeting,

whose advice is never asked about war, or finance, or commerce, by the

heads of the nation, any more than if they were not connected with the

government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and

work! They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously

show it in their bearing, and the way they order their sustenance at the

restaurant–but they work. I know one who has to paste all sorts of

little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook–sometimes as many as

eight or ten scraps a day. He doesn’t do it well, but he does it as well

as he can. It is very fatiguing. It is exhausting to the intellect.

Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year. With a brain like his,

that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some

other pursuit, if he chose to do it. But no–his heart is with his

country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.

And I know clerks that don’t know how to write very well, but such

knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country,

and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year. What they

write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a

man has done his best for his country, should his country complain? Then

there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting,

and waiting for a vacancy–waiting patiently for a chance to help their

country out–and while they, are waiting, they only get barely two

thousand dollars a year for it. It is sad it is very, very sad. When a

member of Congress has a friend who is gifted, but has no employment

wherein his great powers may be brought to bear, he confers him upon his

country, and gives him a clerkship in a department. And there that man

has to slave his life out, fighting documents for the benefit of a nation

that never thinks of him, never sympathizes with him–and all for two

thousand or three thousand dollars a year. When I shall have completed

my list of all the clerks in the several departments, with my statement

of what they have to do, and what they get for it, you will see that

there are not half enough clerks, and that what there are do not get half

enough pay.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

The following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has

sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat. The coincidence between my

own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so

remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the

paragraph. The Sandwich Island paper says:

How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his

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