November, early – As evidenced by a notebook entry: (S & I meet the others in Webster’s office at 11.30), General Philip Sheridan signed a contract for Webster & Co., to publish his Personal Memoirs, which would be completed in 1888.

November – Sam’s notebook: Get John M. to furnish 3 or 4 M at 5 p/c a year & 3 or 4 percent of the whole profits. Note: John W. Mackay, silver baron for investing in the Paige typesetter [MTNJ 3: 263&n124].

Sam also reacted to Welsh protests this month against the Church of England tithes. These protests influenced his depictions of the clergy in CY. In his notebook he includes an anecdote about the farmer’s wife he would use in Ch. 20 of CY. Baetzhold cites the protests as one link in the chain of Sam’s “growing antagonism against England” [John Bull 108-10]. As he would increasingly do, Sam blamed God for much of earth’s problems and injustice:

Suppose God had levied this tax upon the incomes of the rich? How long would it have remained in force? A week? Try to imagine rich godly Englishmen paying from $10,000 to $800,000 a year to the church, & making no murmur, raising no hell about it. What a pity God didn’t levy the tax upon the rich alone. I would. However, he knew the rich couldn’t be forced to pay it & the poor could. With all his brutalities & stupidities & grotesqueries, that old Hebrew God always had a good business head. He always stopped talking shop (that is, piousness, sentiment, sweetness & light), & came right down to business whenever there was matter concerning shekels on hand. His commercial satisfaction in the clink of shekels runs all through his Book — that book whose “every word” he inspired, & whose ideas were all his own; among them the levying a one-tenth income tax upon paupers. We hear a great deal about the interior evidences of the “divine origin” of that Book. Yes; & yet the tithe-tax could have originated in hell if interior evidences go for anything [MTNJ 3: 266].