Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer.  Such a condition means contentment and happiness.  The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him.  The majority will wonder what is the matter with him, and pass on.

A Sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts “—­the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York.  The Sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally.  But it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named.  Another clipping from the same paper reported the “Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions,” as having collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity.”  It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, “head for head”—­in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected.

The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough.  Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred.  The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual.  He printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said: 

By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve—­just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm.  Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels I win, heads you lose.

He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument —­subscriptions to be sent to the American Board.  He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel “to the benighted native”—­how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in Darkness.”

Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”  He put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it.  Howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added, “with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but you’d better hang yourself afterward.”