March 11 Saturday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam added to his Mar. 1 letter to John Kendrick Bangs that he finished on Mar. 12.

March 11. I got interrupted there; & have since prepared & delivered a lecture for a charity—it cost me a raft of time.

The book came, & I started to review it. No use—none in the world,—I had to give it up; I hadn’t the heart to go on. Besant is a friend of mine, & there was no way of doing a review that wouldn’t cut into his feelings & wound his enthusiastic pride in his insane performance. Besant has a fine mind; we know that; but what became of it when he sat down to do this book no one will ever know. The book is not reviewable by any but a sworn enemy of his; for so far as I can see, there isn’t a rational page in it. Why, a person might as well undertake to review a lunatic asylum [MTP].

Note: this may have been Walter Besant (1836-1901): Orange Girl (1899); The Pen and the Book (1899). Gribben p.63 offers a misdated source for this as Mar. 2 but includes other useful notes.

Sam also replied with a letter and a short note of afterthought to John M. Hay, whose incoming letter is not extant. Hay was Secretary of State at this time.

I thank you ever so much for those pleasant words. We are edging along toward that funeral which you refer to; it is not disguisable.

Now then—listen! For a year, off & on, I have been thinking out a simple scheme for the betterment of the Post Office revenues, & now it is finished & for sale. If it were a new & particularly comprehensive way of killing Christians I know the War Department would buy the idea, but I know that governments have sometimes bought ideas of purely commercial value—like the £20,000 paid by the British government for an improved Chronometer, for instance. So there’s a chance!

Sam wanted the Post Office to guarantee him a royalty on the idea of selling a “postal-cheque”, after which he would reveal it in detail. Later in the day Sam sent a follow up paragraph asking Hay not to mention the idea to any one [MTP].Note: see also Sam’s May 4 to Hay.