Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

EUROPE AND ELSEWHIERE
"I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive, that
they generally looted, or that they have done anything since
the siege that the circumstances did not demand. I criticize the.Americans. The soft hand of the Avmericans is not as good as
the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese
with a soft hand they will take advantage of it.
"The statement that the French government will return the
loot taken by the French soldiers is the source of the greatest
amusement here. The French soldiers were more systematic
looters than the Germans, and it is a fact that to-day Catholic
Christians, carrying French flags and armed with moder guns,
are looting villages in the Province of Chili."
By happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on
Christmas Eve-just in time enable us to celebrate
the day with proper gayety and enthusiasm. Our
spirits soar, and we find we can even make jokes:
Taels, I win, Heads you lose.
Our Reverend Ament is the right man in the right
place. What we want of our missionaries out there
is, not that they shall merely represent in their acts
and persons the grace and gentleness and charity
and loving-kindness of our religion, but that they
shall also represent the American spirit. The oldest
Americans are the Pawnees. Macallum's History says:
When a white Boxer kills a Pawnee and destroys his property,
the other Pawnees do not trouble to seek him out, they kill any
white person that comes along; also, they make some white
village pay deceased's heirs the full cash value of deceased,
together with full cash value of the property destroyed; they
allso make the village pay, in addition, thirteen times the value
of that property into a fund for the dissemination of the Pawnee
religion, which they regard as the best of all religions for the
softening and humanizing of the heart of man. It is their idea
that it is only fair and right that the innocent should be made
to suffer for the guilty, and that it is better that ninety and nine
innocent should suffer than that one guilty person should escape.
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