Document – Mark Twain, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905)

Abstract and Keywords

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), who took his pen name from a command shouted on riverboats, was the quintessential American writer: his major works The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are classics about the American experience. A humorist, Twain borrowed and responded to current political material in his works. This essay provides a satirical yet scathing depiction of King Leopold II of Belgium, whom Twain condemned as a heartless imperialist for his destructive policies in the Belgian Congo. Consider how Twain gets his point across while nonetheless speaking from King Leopold’s point of view.

From King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule, By Mark Twain. Boston: The P. R. Warren Co., 1905. Second Edition

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Persons will begin to ask again, as now and then in times past, how I can hope to win and keep the respect of the human race if I continue to give up my life to murder and pillage. [Scornfully] When have they heard me say I wanted the respect of the human race? Do they confuse me with the common herd? do they forget that I am a king? What king has valued the respect of the human race? I mean deep down in his private heart. If they would reflect, they would know that it is impossible that a king should value the respect of the human race. He stands upon an eminence and looks out over the world and sees multitudes of meek human things worshipping the persons, and submitting to the oppressions and exactions, of a dozen human things who are in no way better or finer than themselves—made on just their own pattern, in fact, and out of the same quality of mud. When it talks, it is a race of whales; but a king knows it for a race of tadpoles. Its history gives it away. If men were really men, how could a Czar be possible? and how could I be possible? But we are possible; we are quite safe; and with God’s help we shall continue the business at the old stand. It will be found that the race will put up with us, in its docile immemorial way. It may pull a wry face now and then, and make large talk, but it will stay on its knees all the same.

Making large talk is one of its specialties. It works itself up, and froths at the mouth, and just when you think it is going to through a brick,—it heaves a poem! Lord, what a race it is!

[Reads]

  • A CZAR—1905
  • A pasteboard autocrat; a despot out of date;
  • A fading planet in the glare of day;
  • A flickering candle in the bright sun’s ray,
  • Burnt to the socket; fruit left too late,
  • High on a blighted bough, ripe till it’s rotten.
  • By God forsaken and by time forgotten,
  • Watching the crumbling edges of his hands,
  • A spineless god to whom dumb millions pray,
  • From Finland in the West to far Cathay.
  • Lord of a frost-bound continent he stands,
  • Her seeming ruin his dim mind appalls,
  • And in the frozen stupor of his sleep
  • He hears dull thunders, pealing as she falls,
  • And mighty fragments dropping in the deep.

. . .

If a poet’s bite were as terrible as his bark, why dear me—but it isn’t. A wise king minds neither of them; but the poet doesn’t know it. It’s a case of little dog and lightning express. When the Czar goes thundering by, the poet skips out and rages alongside for a little distance, then returns to his kennel wagging his head with satisfaction, and thinks he has inflicted a memorable scare whereas nothing has really happened—the Czar didn’t know he was around. They never bark at me; I wonder why that is. I suppose my Corruption-Department buys them. That must be it, for certainly I ought to inspire a bark or two; I’m rather choice material, I should say. Why—here is a yelp at me.

[Mumbling a poem]

  • . . . What gives thee holy right to murder hope
  • And water ignorance with human blood?
  • . . . . .
  • From what high universe-dividing power
  • Draws’t thou thy wondrous, ripe brutality?
  • . . . . .
  • O horrible . . . Thou God who seest these things
  • Help us to blot this terror from the earth.

. . . No, I see it is “To the Czar,” after all. But there are those who would say it fits me—and rather snugly, too. “Ripe brutality.” They would say the Czar’s isn’t ripe yet, but that mine is; and not merely ripe but rotten. Nothing could keep them from saying that; they would think it smart.

“This terror.” Let the Czar keep that name; I am supplied. This long time I have been “the monster”; that was their favorite—the monster of crime. But now I have a new one. They have found a fossil Dinosaur fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high, and set it up in the museum in New York and labeled it “Leopold II.” But it is no matter, one does not look for manners in a republic. Um. . . that reminds me; I have never been caricatured. Could it be that the corsairs of the pencil could not find an offensive symbol that was big enough and ugly enough to do my reputation justice? [After reflection] There is no other way—I will buy the Dinosaur. And suppress it. [Rests himself with some more chapter-headings. . .]

. . .

[Studies some photographs of mutilated negroes—throws them down. Sighs] The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed.

. . .

The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now—oh, well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

. . .

. . . What is this fragment? [Reads]

“But enough of trying to tally off his crimes! His list interminable, we should never get to the end of it. His awful shadow lies across his Congo Free State, and under it an unoffending nation of 15,000,000 is withering away and swiftly succumbing to their miseries. It is a land of graves; it is The Land of Graves; it is the Congo Free Graveyard. It is a majestic thought: that is, the ghastliest episode in all of human history is the work of one man alone; one solitary man; just a single individual—Leopold, King of the Belgians. He is personally and solely responsible for all the myriad crimes that have blackened the history of the Congo State. He is sole master there; he is absolute. He could have prevented the crimes by his mere command; he could stop them today with a word. He withholds the word. For his pocket’s sake.

. . .

We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood-drenched kind, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world-solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sole butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward; and—well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look; for he is a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us, by ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shudder and turn away when we come upon them in print.”

Why, certainly—that is my protection. And you will continue to do it. I know the human race.

Review

  1. 1. How does Twain hold King Leopold ‘personally and solely responsible’ for the outrages against human beings in the Congo?

  2. 2. Why has there been so much reluctance to criticize this brutal figure publicly, in Twain’s estimation?

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