Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/216

 MARK TWAIN

and sticks steadily to it. This policy is tran quillity: keep this hive of excitable nations as quiet as possible; encourage them to amuse themselves with things less inflammatory than politics. To this end it furnishes them an abundance of Catholic priests to teach them to be docile and obedient, and to be diligent in acquiring ignorance about things here below, and knowledge about the kingdom of heaven, to whose historic delights they are going to add the charm of their society by and by; and fur ther to this same end it cools off the newspapers every morning at five o clock, whenever warm events are happening.&quot; There is a censor of the press, and apparently he is always on duty and hard at work. A copy of each morning paper is brought to him at five o clock. His official wagons wait at the doors of the newspaper offices and scud to him with the first copies that come from the press. His company of assistants read every line in these papers, and mark everything which seems to have a dangerous look; then he passes final judgment upon these markings. Two things conspire to give to the re sults a capricious and unbalanced look: his assist ants have diversified notions as to what is dangerous and what isn t; he can t get time to examine their criticisms in much detail; and so sometimes the very same matter which is suppressed in one paper fails to be damned in another one, and gets published in full feather and unmodified. Then the paper in which it was suppressed blandly copies the forbidden matter into its evening edition provokingly giving credit and detailing all the circumstances in cour-

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