George has a great post which begs the question, "How do they sleep at night?" His post details a war oposition manuscript that was apprently written by Mark Twain but never published. It has a pretty heavy ring for the bell that tolls for us all right now, with words like this:
..."help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it..."
I dug a little deeper and came up with more info on when and why Twain couldn't publish his 'War Prayer'. The page is pretty pop-up intensive, so here's what it says:
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Mark Twain wrote "The War Prayer" during the Philippine-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper's Bazaar rejected it as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." His editor was "responsible to his Company," he explained, "and should not permit laughs which could injure its business." In his private notebook, Twain expanded his thoughts about the rejection of the story into a series of maxims about freedom of speech:
None but the dead have free speech.
None but the dead are permitted to speak truth.
In America -- as elsewhere -- free speech is confined to the dead.
The minority is always in the right.
When the country is drifting toward Philippine robber-raid henroost raid, do not shirk your duty, do not fail of loyalty, lest you win and deserve the reproach of being a "patriot."
The majority is always in the wrong.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.(1)
Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish "The War Prayer" elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923 when his literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, included it in Europe and Elsewhere. A decade earlier, Paine published long excerpts from the story in Mark Twain: A Biography.
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For the whole War Prayer, hop over to george's place.
