April 27 Sunday – Fatout lists this date for the Max O’Rell Dinner at the Everett House in Boston, Mass. where Sam gave a speech, “continuing his feud with foreign critics in general and with the ghost of Matthew Arnold in particular,” with “On Foreign Critics” [MT Speaking 257-60].

If I look harried and worn, it is not from an ill conscience. It is from sitting up nights to worry about the foreign critic. He won’t concede that we have a civilization — a “real” civilization. Five years ago, he said we had never contributed anything to the betterment of the world. And now comes Sir Lepel Griffin, whom I had not suspected of being in the world at all, and says “there is no country calling itself civilized where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia.” That settles it. That settles it for Europe; but it doesn’t make me any more comfortable than I was before.

What is a “real” civilization? Nobody can answer that conundrum. They have all tried. Then suppose we try to get at what it is not…. Let us say, then, in broad terms, that any system which has in it any one of these things, to wit, human slavery, despotic government, inequality, numerous and brutal punishments for crimes, superstition almost universal, ignorance almost universal, and dirt and poverty almost universal — is not a real civilization, and any system which has none of them, is.

If you grant these terms, one may then consider this conundrum: How old is real civilization? The answer is easy and unassailable. A century ago it had not appeared anywhere in the world during a single instant since the world was made. If you grant these terms — and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be fair, since civilization must surely mean the humanizing of a people, not a class — there is today but one real civilization in the world, and it is not yet thirty years old. We made the trip and hoisted its flag when we disposed of our slavery.

Note: Max O’Rell was the pseudonym for Leon Paul Blouët (1848-1903), French humorist and newspaperman in England, who lectured in the U.S. in 1887 and 1890. Sam saw O’Rell as “an unoriginal humorist who palmed off as his own the good things of others” [260]. Fatout gives this date as “conjecturally.”