[The following two Letters to the Editor appeared adjacent to one another on this date.]
AGREES WITH MARK TWAIN.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
Having read the editorial in your today's issue, "Certainly False but Probably Funny," I gratified the curiosity thereby excited, and read Mr. Mark Twain's article in The North American Review, to which you refer.
It gave me great pleasure and satisfaction to find expressed n such a clear, cogent, and interesting manner the exact views which I and many other loyal American citizens have entertained from the very beginning upon the subjects treated of in that article.
On the Boer war, the Chinese questions, and the vicious methods of many of the missionaries in China and the East, Russia's treatment of Japan, our conduct in the Philippine invasion, and the absurdity and wickedness in our having paid $20,000,000 to Spain for the archipelago, he speaks for patriotic Americans, who look at these questions without commercialism or maudlin Christian or otherwise perverted progressiveness.
It speaks the truth, and dispels the sophisms of Chamberlain, McKinley, and the rest.
Every one must, however, realize that having gone so far in the Philippine situation we can repair our wrongful acts only by an unselfish consideration of the natives, and leave wholly out of view our "material" advantages.
It is quite misleading to suppose that Mr. McKinley's re-election is to be taken as an indorsement of his policy. It was solely an emphatic protest against the charlatan Bryan.
A CHRISTIAN PATRIOT.
New York, Feb. 7, 1901
_____
MARK TWAIN'S YOUNGER DAYS.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
In Mark Twain's younger and better and humorous days he had as auditor of one of his lectures in a Western city a certain old gentleman, who remarked afterward: "There were good things in it, but at times he seemed to verge on unveracity."
The old gentleman's prophetic wisdom excited only a gently contemptuous merriment in those days.
G.S.C.
Morristown, Feb. 7, 1901.
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