October 11 Wednesday – On a day when England’s ultimatum to the Boers expired and war was to begin, Sam wrote a squib, just to whom has not been determined..

London, 3.07 P.M., Wednesday, October 11, 1899. The time is up! Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in South Africa at this moment. Some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. Whose heart is broken by this murder? For, be he Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company [MTB 1095]. Note: Paine quotes this and also uses the holographic illustration of the note on p. 1097. Lest the reader be confused, as this editor was at first, the note does not have anything to do with the letter to C.F. Moberly Bell “Don’t give me away…” of July 16, 1900, part of which is also shown above the illustration.

Edward Everett Hale wrote to Sam from Roxbury, Mass., to thank him for the article in the Cosmopolitan. “Seriously, I think it will do no end of good. There are some things which can only be met by ridicule, and where ridicule does work that no amount of logic can do. / You have tackled a problem which all the rest of us have shirked, and it seems to me that you have done it wonderfully well” [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the letter “Ans Nov 1 ’99.”