July 27 Saturday – Sam’s article, “Archimedes,” a burlesque against high rents and the “present evils of land monopoly” ran in the New York Standard, under the pseudonym, “Twark Main,” as an Australian writer. This piece turned up in the early 1950’s in a search of microfilm files for the defunct newspaper (1887-1892).

“Give me whereon to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the earth.” The boast was a pretty safe one, for he knew quite well that the standing place was wanting, and always would be wanting. But suppose he had moved the earth, what then? What benefit would it have been to anybody? The job would never have paid working expenses, let alone dividends, and so what was the use of talking about it? From what astronomers tell us, I should reckon the earth moved quite fast enough already, and if there happened to be a few cranks who were dissatisfied with its rate of progress, as far as I am concerned, they might push it along for themselves; I would not move a finger or subscribe a penny piece to assist in anything of the kind. Why such a fellow as Archimedes should be looked upon as a genius I never understood; I never heard that he made a pile, or did anything else worth talking about. As for that last contract he took in hand, it was the worst bungle I ever knew; he undertook to keep the Romans out of Syracuse; he tried first one dodge and then another, but they got in after all, and when it came to fair fighting he was out of it altogether, a common soldier in a very businesslike sort of way settling all his pretensions.

 It is evident that he was an overrated man. He was in the habit of making a lot of fuss about his screws and levers, about his knowledge of mechanics was in reality of a very limited character. I have never set up for a genius myself, but I know of a mechanical force more powerful than anything the vaunting engineer of Syracuse ever dreamt of. It is the force of a land monopoly; it is a screw and lever all in one; it will screw the last penny out of a man’s pocket, and bend everything on earth to its own despotic will. Give me the private ownership of land, and will I move the earth? No; but I will do more. I will undertake to make slaves of all the human beings on the face of it. Not chattel slaves exactly, but slaves nevertheless. What an idiot I would be to make chattel slaves of them. I would have to find them salts and senna when they were sick, and whip them to work when they were lazy. No, it is not good enough. Under the system I propose the fools would imagine they were all free….It would be this way, you see: As I owned all the land, they would, of course, have to pay me rent. …[Reprinted in The Twainian, Nov-Dec. 1953 p.2-3 as the Australian Standard; See also Budd, Social Philos 113]. Note: The Twainian evidently did not catch the spoof.

William N. Woodruff for Woodruff’s Keying System Co., Hartford, wrote to Sam, having just returned from Europe where he’d seen a typesetting machine — “the greatest mechanical achievement…in the history of mechanical work.” Woodruff hoped Sam would reap “the reward that such great enterprises are entitled to” [MTP].