King Leopold's Soliloquy

From the publisher:

Mark Twain became embittered in his final years -- so said the cynics. What is seen today as one reads his many moving and wonderful polemics is that a great humorist became a great satirist -- and a warm and deep-feeling humanist was not only aroused by inustice but turned his fine talent toward exposing it -- and toward trying to make ours a better world. It was in this spirit that Mark Twain decided to write "King Leopold's Soliloquy."

When first requested to lend his pen for the cause of the Congo people, he refused. Two years later, in 1904, his conscience no longer permitted him to stay aloof from the need to arouse the world to what was being perpetrated against a harmless and unprotected people. Thus the "Soliloquy" came to be written. It makes Mark Twain a great polemicist in American literature.