Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/250

 MARK TWAIN

This remark was frankly printed in its entirety by one of the Vienna dailies, but the others disguised the toughest half of it with stars.

If the reader will go back over this chapter and gather its array of extraordinary epithets into a bunch and examine them, he will marvel at two things : how this convention of gentlemen could con sent to use such gross terms ; and why the users were allowed to get out of the place alive. There is no way to understand this strange situation. If every man in the House were a professional blackguard, and had his home in a sailor boarding-house, one could still not understand it ; for although that sort do use such terms, they never take them. These men are not professional blackguards; they are mainly gentlemen, and educated; yet they use the terms, and take them, too. They really seem to attach no consequence to them. One cannot say that they act like school-boys; for that is only almost true, not en tirely. School-boys blackguard each other fiercely, and by the hour, and one would think that nothing would ever come of it but noise; but that would be a mistake. Up to a certain limit the result would be noise only, but that limit overstepped, trouble would follow right away. There are certain phrases phrases of a peculiar character phrases of the nature of that reference to Schonerer s grandmother, for instance, which not even the most spiritless school-boy in the English-speaking world would al low to pass unavenged. One difference between school-boys and the lawmakers of the Reichsrath 8eems to be that the lawmakers have no limit, no

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