Twain on Cecil Rhodes as a land monopolizing enslaver ... |
What is the secret of his [Cecil Rhodes's] formidable supremacy? One says it is his prodigious wealth--a wealth whose drippings in salaries and and in other ways support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassels; another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of England, his patriotic and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection and her just rule over the pagan wastes of Africa and make luminous the African darkness with the glory of her name; and another says he wants the earth, wants it for his own, and that the secret belief that he will get it and let his friends in on the ground floor is *the* secret that rivets so many eyse on him and keeps him in the zenith...
I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope as a keepsake... The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him on terms determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old, cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gangs have been following the old ways. They have been chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of "purchase" for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue "regulations" requiring the incensed and harrassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and it is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when the Rhodesian slave is sick, superannuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve--his master is under no obligation to support him.
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by the swift method of chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over on thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it. --from *Following the Equator*
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From "The Lowest Animal" |
Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country-takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him. Man has done this in all the ages. There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed. Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day he is always some man's slave for wages, and does that man's work, and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who do their own work and provide their own living. Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and to keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"-with his mouth. |
From an address to Congress on copyrights |
(Twain was arguing the injustice that land titles are perpetual but that copyrights are not. He lampoons the oft used claim that people ae entitled to be enriched by land monopoly because of their foresight in realizing that the land will increase in value.) I put a supposititious case, a dozen Englishmen who travel through South Africa and camp out, and eleven of them see nothing at all; they are mentally blind. But there is one in the party who knows what this harbor means and what the lay of the land means. To him it means that some day a railway will go through here, and there on that harbor a great city will spring up. That is his idea. And he has another idea, which is to go and trade his last bottle of Scotch whiskey and his last horse-blanket to the principal chief of that region and buy a piece of land the size of Pennsylvania. |