Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane when not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U.S. Senator — Cullom — wants this Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchings — of men who are not dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom will keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause.
And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death attempts upon a President's life — this, mind you, as a deterrent. It would have no effect — or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space is all occupied — as mine was — with the matter in hand; there is no room in it for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after the crime.
It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy the criminal his vast notoriety—his obscure name tongued by stupendous Kings and Emperors—his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps, what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty thousand dollars a day — and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday! — like the assassin of the President of France — in debt three francs to his landlady, and insulted by her — and to-day she is proud to be able to say she knew him "as familiarly as you know your own brother," and glad to stand till she drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur and her happiness upon the eager interviewer.
Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute silence — the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to manage that? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life; by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race. It is quite simple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a day off and attend to it, Joe. I blow a kiss to you, and am Lovingly Yours,
MARK.
—Mark Twain, letter (To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford)
