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From Mark Twain Tonight
I’m not lying to you. I don’t tell lies. I differ from George Washington. I have a higher and grander standard of principle. George could not tell a lie. I can but I won’t. Oh I used to tell lies. But I’ve given it up. The field is overrun with amateurs. While when I look around me and contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day, it grieves me to see the noble art so prostituted. In my day, a liar was a liar. I don’t mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay. It couldn’t. For the lie is eternal. It is man’s best and surest friend and it cannot perish from the earth while Congress remains in session. No when I talk about the decay and the art of lying, I’m talking about the silent lie. It requires no art; you simply keep still and conceal the truth. For example, it would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery. And yet in those early days of the Emancipation Agitation, in the North those agitators got small help from anyone. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that rained from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society. The clammy stillness created and maintained by the silent assertion. The silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people ought to be interested. Well, when whole nations of people conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies like that one in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care about the trifling ones told by individuals? Why make them undesirable? Why not be honest and honorable and lie every chance we get? Why should we help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one little insignificant private lie… in our own interest? Just for the refreshment of it, I mean. And to take the rancid taste out of our mouth. No, there is no art to the silent lying. It is timid and shabby. Well I’ve been addressing my remarks to the young people in this audience. The old ones are passed saving. But I honestly hope the young ones will understand me and take heed. I hope it. And I doubt it. When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so stupid, I could scarcely stand to have the old man around. But by the time I got to be twentyone, I was astonished at how much he had learned in the last seven years. Training and association can accomplish strange miracles sometimes. In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. Local papers said nothing against it. Local pulpit taught us that God approved of it. That it was a holy thing. And the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind. And then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matters sure. If there were passages in the Bible which disapproved of slavery, they were not quoted by our pastors. I wonder how they could lie so? Result of practice no doubt. And the serene confidence of a Christian… with four aces. When I was a boy, I saw a brave gentlemen deride and insult a lynching mob and drive it away. Where the truth is that no mob has any sand in it in the presence of a man known to be splendidly brave. But where should such brave men be found? If physically brave men would do, well that would be easy. You’d be happy with a cargo. But morally brave men, and women, who can face up to churchgoing gangs of hooded murderers… don’t seem to be very many morally brave people left in stock. We appear to be in a condition of profound poverty there. What we really need is some starters. But where should we get them? Advertise? Very well then, let’s advertise. Meanwhile there’s another plan. Why don’t we import American missionaries from China and send them into the lynching field? Well there are one thousand five hundred and eleven American missionaries out there converting two Chinamen apiece per atom, against an uphill birth rate of 33,000 Pagans per day. Now if we can offer our missionaries a rich a field at home at lighter expense and quite satisfactory in the matter of danger, why shouldn’t they come back and give us a trial? Why those Chinese people are universally conceited to be honest. Industrious. Honorable. Why don’t we give those poor things a rest, huh? Besides, every convert runs the risk of catching our civilization. Want to think twice before we encourage a risk like that. For once civilized, China can never be uncivilized again. I’ve been thinking about that. “Oh kind missionary. Oh compassionate missionary. Leave China! Come home! And convert these Christians!” Oh what a Hell of a Heaven it’s going to be when all those hypocrites assemble there.