January 23 Tuesday – Sam’s San Francisco Letter dated Jan. 18 ran in the Enterprise. Sections: “A Righteous Judge,” “The Righteous Shall Not be Forgotten,” and “Chief Burke.”
A RIGHTEOUS JUDGE
Judge Rix decides that the word “bilk” is obscene, and has fined a man for using it. He ought to have hanged him; but considering that he had not power to do that, and considering that he punished him as severely as the law permitted him to do, we should all be satisfied, and enter a credit mark in our memories for Judge Rix. That word is in all our dictionaries, and is by all odds the foulest one there. Its sound is against it—just as the reader’s countenance is against him, perhaps, or just as the face or voice of many a man we meet is against the owner, and repels a stranger. The word was popular a hundred years ago, and then it meant swindling, or defrauding, and was applicable to all manner of cheating. Having such a wide significance, perhaps its disgusting sound was forgiven it in consideration of its services. But it went out of date—became obsolete, and slept for nearly a century. And then it woke up ten years ago a different word—a superannuated word shorn of every virtue that made it respectable. The hoary verb woke up in a bawdy house after its Rip Van Winkle sleep of three generations and found itself essentially vulgar and obscene, in that it had but one solitary significance, and that described the defrauding a harlot of the wages she has earned. Since then its jurisdiction has been enlarged somewhat, but nothing can refine it—nothing can elevate it; it is permanently disgraced; it will never get rid of the odor of the bawdy house. The decision of Judge Rix closes respectable lips against its utterance and banishes it to the domain of prostitution, where it belongs. Depart in peace, proscribed Bilk! [Schmidt: “A Righteous Judge” and “The Righteous Shall Not Be Forgotten” reprinted in Bancroftiana, Fall 1999 10, 12. “Chief Burke” San Francisco Examiner (February 5 and 7, 1866) and Albert Bigelow Paine’s Biography].
Sam dug himself an even deeper hole with more comments on police Chief Martin J. Burke: The air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery. I want to compliment Chief Burke—I do honestly. But I can’t find anything to compliment him about. He is always rushing furiously around, like a dog after his own tail—and with the same general result, it seems to me; if he catches it, it don’t amount to anything, after all the fuss; and if he don’t catch it it don’t make any difference, because he didn’t want it anyhow; he only wanted the exercise, and the happiness of “showing off” before his mistress and the other young ladies. But if the Chief would only do something praiseworthy, I would be the first and most earnest and cordial to give him the credit due. I would sling him a compliment that would knock him down. I mean that it would be such a first-class compliment that it might surprise him to that extent as coming from me [Schmidt; see also Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain’s Imbroglio with the San Francisco Police: Three Lost Texts. American Literature, V. 62 No. 4 (Dec. 1990) p 686-91.