The Burden of Proof

The orator is giving a speech about "our glorious British liberties" while thirty steps away, in the market square, a slave auction is in progress. Hank and the king have just been handcuffed together by the man who "rescued" them. The orator notices their protest. He gathers his patriotic crowd around them and says:

"If, indeed, ye are freemen, ye have nought to fear—the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs."

"What proofs?"

"Proof that ye are freemen."

The law requires you to prove you are not a slave. Not the reverse. If you cannot prove freedom, you are subject to sale.

Hank notes: "This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish. Well, that's the way we are made."

That's the way we are made. Not "that was wrong of me." Not "I was morally deficient before." Simply: this is how proximity to suffering works. The abstract knowledge that something is unjust has an entirely different valence than standing in the auction with your hands bound behind you.

The echo of the earlier chapter is intentional. Arthur knew the law about freemen and slaves "by words, not by effects." Hank knew the injustice of reversed burden of proof by words, not by effects. The slavery law of the antebellum South was "merely improper" when it was happening to other people — people Hank presumably thought of as closer to the suffering than he was, people for whom this kind of thing was an established pattern, a known risk.

And then it happened to him and it became "suddenly hellish."

What's remarkable is that Twain doesn't let this be a redemption moment. Hank doesn't say: now I understand what I failed to understand before, and I will carry this understanding forward. He just observes it: "that's the way we are made." It's a description of a mechanism, not a moral lesson. We have a limited range of moral imagination, and we fill that range with the people we stand next to, the circumstances that could happen to us, the laws that have a personal hook.

There is something honest about this. The alternative — claiming that abstract moral knowledge is equivalent to the real thing, that you can be moved to action by statistics the same way you're moved by your own handcuffs — is a comfortable lie. Hank is a man of genuinely progressive views who was fine with the antebellum reversed-burden-of-proof law until it applied to him, and he admits it plainly.

The question is whether admitting it is enough. Twain doesn't say. The orator keeps talking about British liberties while the auction continues.