Letter VII
Letters from the Earth
by Mark Twain
N oah and his family were saved -- if that could be called an advantage.
I throw in the if for the reason that there has never been an intelligent
person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again.
His or anyone else's. The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable,
for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese
with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but
it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply
the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight
persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far
the most important part of the Ark's cargo, and the part the Creator was
most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment
and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs,
and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague
germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations,
golden bearers of God's love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father
to his children -- all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly
entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of
the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in
the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great
intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions,
and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving;
and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The
large intestine was in effect their heaven. They stuffed it solid; they
made it as rigid as a coil of gaspipe. They took pride in this. Their principal
hymn made gratified reference to it:
The discomforts furnished by the Ark were many and various. The family
had to live right in the presence of the multitudinous animals, and breathe
the distressing stench they make and be deafened day and night with the
thunder-crash of noise their roarings and screechings produced; and
in additions to these intolerable discomforts it was a peculiarly trying
place for the ladies, for they could look in no direction without seeing
some thousands of the creatures engaged in multiplying and replenishing.
And then, there were the flies. They swarmed everywhere, and persecuted
the Family all day long. They were the first animals up, in the morning,
and the last ones down, at night. But they must not be killed, they must
not be injured, they were sacred, their origin was divine, they were the
special pets of the Creator, his darlings.
By and by the other creatures would be distributed here and there about
the earth -- scattered: the tigers to India, the lions and the elephants
to the vacant desert and the secret places of the jungle, the birds to
the boundless regions of empty space, the insects to one or another climate,
according to nature and requirement; but the fly? He is of no nationality;
all the climates are his home, all the globe is his province, all creatures
that breathe are his prey, and unto them all he is a scourge and a hell.
To man he is a divine ambassador, a minister plenipotentiary, the Creator's
special representative. He infests him in his cradle; clings in bunches
to his gummy eyelids; buzzes and bites and harries him, robbing him of
his sleep and his weary mother of her strength in those long vigils which
she devotes to protecting her child from this pest's persecutions. The
fly harries the sick man in his home, in the hospital, even on his deathbed
at his last gasp. Pesters him at his meals; previously hunts up patients
suffering from loathsome and deadly diseases; wades in their sores, gaums
its legs with a million death-dealing germs; then comes to that healthy
man's table and wipes these things off on the butter and discharges a bowel-load
of typhoid germs and excrement on his batter-cakes. The housefly wrecks
more human constitutions and destroys more human lives than all God's multitude
of misery-messengers and death-agents put together.
Shem was full of hookworms. It is wonderful, the thorough and comprehensive
study which the Creator devoted to the great work of making man miserable.
I have said he devised a special affliction-agent for each and every
detail of man's structure, overlooking not a single one, and I said the
truth. Many poor people have to go barefoot, because they cannot afford
shoes. The Creator saw his opportunity. I will remark, in passing, that
he always has his eye on the poor. Nine-tenths of his disease-inventions
were intended for the poor, and they get them. The well-to-do
get only what is left over. Do not suspect me of speaking unheedfully,
for it is not so: the vast bulk of the Creator's affliction-inventions
are specially designed for the persecution of the poor. You could guess
this by the fact that one of the pulpit's finest and commonest names for
the Creator is "The Friend of the Poor." Under no circumstances
does the pulpit ever pay the Creator a compliment that has a vestige of
truth in it. The poor's most implacable and unwearying enemy is their Father
in Heaven. The poor's only real friend is their fellow man. He is sorry
for them, he pities them, and he shows it by his deeds. He does much to
relieve their distresses; and in every case their Father in Heaven gets
the credit of it.
Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which has been
working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break
into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good
he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years
before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about
it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long
tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does
is to advertise it as God's work, and invite the people to get down on
their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says
with admiring emotion, "Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never
sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not
always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them
in his appointed day."
They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe;
that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century
to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there
is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always
thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done
it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.
Very well, six thousand years ago Shem was full of hookworms. Microscopic
in size, invisible to the unaided eye. All of the Creator's specially deadly
disease-producers are invisible. It is an ingenious idea. For thousands
of years it kept man from getting at the roots of his maladies, and defeated
his attempts to master them. It is only very recently that science has
succeeded in exposing some of these treacheries.
The very latest of these blessed triumphs of science is the discovery
and identification of the ambuscaded assassin which goes by the name of
the hookworm. Its special prey is the barefooted poor. It lies in wait
in warm regions and sandy places and digs its way into their unprotected
feet.
The hookworm was discovered two or three years ago by a physician, who
had been patiently studying its victims for a long time. The disease induced
by the hookworm had been doing its evil work here and there in the earth
ever since Shem landed on Ararat, but it was never suspected to be
a disease at all. The people who had it were merely supposed to be lazy,
and were therefore despised and made fun of, when they should have been
pitied. The hookworm is a peculiarly sneaking and underhanded invention,
and has done its surreptitious work unmolested for ages; but that physician
and his helpers will exterminate it now.
God is back of this. He has been thinking about it for six thousand
years, and making up his mind. The idea of exterminating the hookworm was
his. He came very near doing it before Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles did.
But he is in time to get the credit of it. He always is.
It is going to cost a million dollars. He was probably just in the act
of contributing that sum when a man pushed in ahead of him -- as usual.
Mr. Rockefeller. He furnishes the million, but the credit will go elsewhere
-- as usual. This morning's journal tells us something about the hookworm's
operations:
The hookworm parasites often so lower the vitality of those who are
affected as to retard their physical and mental development, render them
more susceptible to other diseases, make labor less efficient, and in the
sections where the malady is most prevalent greatly increase the death
rate from consumption, pneumonia, typhoid fever and malaria. It has been
shown that the lowered vitality of multitudes, long attributed to malaria
and climate and seriously affecting economic development, is in fact due
in some districts to this parasite. The disease is by no means confined
to any one class; it takes its toll of suffering and death from the highly
intelligent and well to do as well as from the less fortunate. It is a
conservative estimate that two millions of our people are affected by this
parasite. The disease is more common and more serious in children of school
age than in other persons.
Widespread and serious as the infection is, there is still a most encouraging
outlook. The disease can be easily recognized, readily and effectively
treated and by simple and proper sanitary precautions successfully prevented
[with God's help].
The poor children are under the Eye that never sleeps, you see. They
have had that ill luck in all the ages. They and "the Lord's poor"
-- as the sarcastic phrase goes -- have never been able to get away from
that Eye's attentions.
Yes, the poor, the humble, the ignorant -- they are the ones that catch
it. Take the "Sleeping Sickness," of Africa. This atrocious cruelty
has for its victims a race of ignorant and unoffending blacks whom God
placed in a remote wilderness, and bent his parental Eye upon them -- the
one that never sleeps when there is a chance to breed sorrow for somebody.
He arranged for these people before the Flood. The chosen agent was a fly,
related to the tsetse; the tsetse is a fly which has command of the Zambezi
country and stings cattle and horses to death, thus rendering that region
uninhabitable by man. The tsetse's awful relative deposits a microbe which
produces the Sleeping Sickness. Ham was full of these microbes, and when
the voyage was over he discharged them in Africa and the havoc began, never
to find amelioration until six thousand years should go by and science
should pry into the mystery and hunt out the cause of the disease. The
pious nations are now thanking God, and praising him for coming to the
rescue of his poor blacks. The pulpit says the praise is due to him. He
is surely a curious Being. He commits a fearful crime, continues that crime
unbroken for six thousand years, and is then entitled to praise because
he suggests to somebody else to modify its severities. He is called patient,
and he certainly must be patient, or he would have sunk the pulpit in perdition
ages ago for the ghastly compliments it pays him.
Science has this to say about the Sleeping Sickness, otherwise called
the Negro Lethargy:
It is characterized by periods of sleep recurring at intervals. The
disease lasts from four months to four years, and is always fatal. The
victim appears at first languid, weak, pallid, and stupid. His eyelids
become puffy, an eruption appears on his skin. He falls asleep while talking,
eating, or working. As the disease progresses he is fed with difficulty
and becomes much emaciated. The failure of nutrition and the appearance
of bedsores are followed by convulsions and death. Some patients become
insane.
It is he whom Church and people call Our Father in Heaven who has invented
the fly and sent him to inflict this dreary long misery and melancholy
and wretchedness, and decay of body and mind, upon a poor savage who has
done that Great Criminal no harm. There isn't a man in the world who doesn't
pity that poor black sufferer, and there isn't a man that wouldn't make
him whole if he could. To find the one person who has no pity for him you
must go to heaven; to find the one person who is able to heal him and couldn't
be persuaded to do it, you must go to the same place. There is only one
father cruel enough to afflict his child with that horrible disease --
only one. Not all the eternities can produce another one. Do you like reproachful
poetical indignations warmly expressed? Here is one, hot from the heart
of a slave:
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What do you think? Tell me about it!
