QUIPS AND CRANKS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 741, 14 May 1886, Page 6

QUIPS AND CRANKS.

CAMPAIGN LIES. Make: Twain’s Experience The Developments Following His Nomination eor Governor. A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great State of New York, to run against John T. Smith and Blank J. on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was good character. It was easy to see by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good name, that time had gone by. It was plain that in these latter years they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes. But at the very moment that I was exalting my advantage, and joying in it in secret, there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort * riling ’ the deeps of my happiness, and that was—the having my name bandied about in familiar connection with such people. I grew more and more disturbed. Finally I wrote my grandmother about it. Her answer came quick and sharp. She said : ‘ You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed of—not one. Look at the newspapers —look at them and comprehend what sort of characters Smith and Blank are, and then see if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a public canvass with them.’ But I could not recede. I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight. As I was looking listlessly over the papers at breakfast, I came across this paragraph, and I may truly say I never was so confounded before :

* Perjury.—Perhaps, now that Mr Mark Twain is before the people as candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to be convicted of perjury by thirtyfour witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin Ch'na, in 1563, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor native woman and her helpless family of a meagre plantain patch, their only stay and support in their bereavement and desolation. Mr Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up. Will he do it ?’ I thought I should burst with amazement. Such a cruel, heartless charge. I never had seen Cochin China. I never had heard of Wakawak. I didn’t know a plantain patch from a kangaroo. I was crazed and helpless. I let the day slip away without doing any thing at all. The next day the same paper had this—nothing more : . , ‘Significant. —Mr Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively silent about the Coehin China perjury.’ [Mem —During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in any. other way than ‘ the infamous perjurer Twain. ] Next same The Gazette with this :

‘ Wanted to Know.—Will the new candidate for Governor deign to explain to certain of his fellow citizens the little circumstance of his cabin mates in Montana losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these things having been invariably found on,Mr Twain’s person or in his trunk (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to give him a friendly admonitiou for his own good, and so tarred and feathered him and rode him on a rail out of camp. Will he do this ?’ Could anything be more deliberately malicious than tuis? For I never was in Montana in my life. [After this the journal continuously spoke of me as * Twain, the Mountain Thief.’] I got to picking up papers apprehensively —much as one would lift a desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it. One day this met my eye : * The Lie Nailed. —By the sworn affidavit of Michael O’Flanaghan, Esq., and Mr Snub Rafferty, and Mr Catty Mulligan, it is established that Mr Mark Twain’s statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal and gratuitous lie, without a shadow of foundation in fact.’

And yet I can lay my hand on the book and say I never slandered Mr Blank s grandfather. More, I had never even heard of him or'mentioned him up to date. [I will state in passing that the journal above quoted always referred to me afterward as ‘ Twain, the Body Snatcher. ] The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following : ‘A Sweet Candidate. —Mark Twain, who was to make such a blighting speech at the mass meeting last night, didn't come to time. A telegram from his physician stated that he had been knocked down by a runaway team and his leg broken in two places —sufferer lying in great agony and so forth and so forth, and a lot of more bosh of the same sort. And the Independents tried hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge and pretend that they did not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned creature whom they denominated their standard-bearer. A certain man was seen to reel into Mr Twain’s hotel last night, in a state of beastly intoxication. It is the imperative duty of the Independents to prove that the besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself. We have them at last. This is a case that admits of no shirking. The voice of the people demands in thunder tones : “ Who was that man ?” ’ Three long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine, or liquor of any kind. [The same journal immediately dubbed me ‘ Mr Delirium Tremens Twain.’] By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an * answer ’ to all the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any longer. The following appeared in one of the papers the very next day : ‘ Behold the Man—The independent candidate still maintains silence. Because he dare not speak. Every accusation against him has been amply proved, and they have been indorsed and re indorsed by his own eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted. Look upon the infamous perjurer ! the Montana thief ! the bodysnatcher ! the delirium tremens ! the filthy corruptionist ! Can you give your honest votes to a creature who dares not open his mouth in denial of any of his hideous crimes ?’

There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so in deep humiliation I set about preparing to ‘ answer ’ a mass of baseless charges and mean and wicked falsehoods. But I never finished the task, for the very next morning a paper catne out with a new horror, charging me with burning a lunatic asylum, with all its inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house. This threw me into a sort of panic. Then the principal Republican journals ‘convicted’ me of wholesale bribery, and of poisoning my uncle to get his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened. This drove me to the verge of distraction. On the top of this I was accused of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food for the foundling hospital when I was warden. At last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little, toddling children, of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush on to the platform at a public meeting and clasp me around the legs and call me pa. Truly yours, once a decent man, Mari-; Twain.