While we are all certainly free to grab Twain's writings by the scruff and apply and misapply them to modern events and issues in any way we please, it's quite a leap to speculate what Twain would have thought or said himself. Fun maybe, but perhaps pointless as well. For example, I think some of Twain's anti-Imperialist writings on the Phillipines are remarkably relevant to the Iraqi War, and others may disagree, but none of us know what Twain would have thought of Iraq if he were alive today. Yes, we all think we know, but none of us do. To approach some understanding of what Twain thought about "mixed" marriages at different points in his life, study his writings, and don't confine the notion of "mixed" to race. In Twain's day marrying somebody of a different religion or nationality could be an explosive challenge to some notions of "social norms" just as much as marrying outside one's race. The earliest of his writings I can think of that might apply would be the newspaper story about local funds being sent to a miscegenation society back east that forced him to flee Nevada in 1864. PW certainly applies at a later date. What did Twain think of House and his "ward" or whatever she might have been? Then Clara married a Russian and Twain, who really seemed to like Ossip, had some oddly unenthusiastic things to say about that marriage, not framed in racial or ethnic terms, but odd. I can't think of any close friends or acquaintances of Twain who were in mixed marriages, and invite anyone to cite an example, as well as other relevant writings. Finally, given Twain's general avoidance of the subject of sex and his problems handling his daughters as they asserted their independence, he seemed uncomfortable with the idea of any of them marrying anybody, and the subject of race seems distant. Kevin Mac Donnell Austin TX