Complete Letters of Mark Twain, page 649 by Mark Twain
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k--and did. Within an hour--within half of it-- I was ashamed of myself--and felt unspeakably ridiculous. I do not know what to call it if I was not insane. During a whole week my head was in a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset a stronger reason than mine.
All over the world, every day, there are some millions of men in that condition temporarily. And in that time there is always a moment-- perhaps only a single one when they would do murder if their man was at hand. If the opportunity comes a shade too late, the chances are that it has come permanently too late. Opportunity seldom comes exactly at the supreme moment. This saves a million lives a day in the world--for sure.
No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous details of it are ravenously devoured by a hundred thousand men whose minds dwell, unaware, near the temporary-insanity frontier--and over they go, now! There is a day--two days--three--during which no Ruler would be safe from perhaps the half of them; and there is a single moment wherein he would not be safe from any of them, no doubt.
It may take this present shooting-case six months to breed another ruler- tragedy, but it will breed it. There is at least one mind somewhere which will brood, and wear, and decay itself to the killing-point and produce that tragedy.
Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain of another one--I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the lurid theatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; and that begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on. Every lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white men, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8 months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.
Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane when not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants this Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchi