In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he wrote: 

If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing—­he will decide it against you every time.  And so will the New York policeman.  In London if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it.  In New York—­but no one carries a cab case into court there.  It is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there.

Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers’ union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship.  At the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: 

“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir.  It is simply practical business.  You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal interest whatever.  I am doing this just as any citizen should do.  He has no choice.  He has a distinct duty.  He is a non-classified policeman.  Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so.  Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city—­a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist.  You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge.  He is not the criminal here at all.  The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism.  I am not here to avenge myself on him.  I have no quarrel with him.  My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way.”

The driver’s license was suspended.  The case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in New York City.

But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect.  His many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral.  He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing.  The human race was behaving very badly:  unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese.  In his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for New-Year’s Eve, 1900, had written: 

      A greeting from the nineteenth to the twentieth century