<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <SPAN name="c25" id="c25"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER XXV </h2>
<p><br/></p>
<p>A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="25-315.jpg (136K)" src="images/25-315.jpg" width-obs="100%" /><br/></div>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>When the king traveled for change of air, or made a progress, or visited a
distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost of his keep, part
of the administration moved with him. It was a fashion of the time.
The Commission charged with the examination of candidates for posts
in the army came with the king to the Valley, whereas they could have
transacted their business just as well at home. And although this
expedition was strictly a holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of
his business functions going just the same. He touched for the evil,
as usual; he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried cases, for he was
himself Chief Justice of the King's Bench.</p>
<p>He shone very well in this latter office. He was a wise and humane
judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest,—according to
his lights. That is a large reservation. His lights—I
mean his rearing—often colored his decisions. Whenever there
was a dispute between a noble or gentleman and a person of lower degree,
the king's leanings and sympathies were for the former class always,
whether he suspected it or not. It was impossible that this should
be otherwise. The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's
moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged
class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
This has a harsh sound, and yet should not be offensive to any—even
to the noble himself—unless the fact itself be an offense: for
the statement simply formulates a fact. The repulsive feature of slavery
is the <i>thing</i> , not its name. One needs but to hear an
aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize—and
in but indifferently modified measure—the very air and tone of the
actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder's spirit, the
slaveholder's blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause in
both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding
himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent
injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and
unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the
average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children
in famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.</p>
<p>One very curious case came before the king. A young girl, an orphan,
who had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow who had
nothing. The girl's property was within a seigniory held by the
Church. The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion of the great
nobility, claimed the girl's estate on the ground that she had married
privately, and thus had cheated the Church out of one of its rights as
lord of the seigniory—the one heretofore referred to as le droit du
seigneur. The penalty of refusal or avoidance was confiscation.
The girl's defense was, that the lordship of the seigniory was
vested in the bishop, and the particular right here involved was not
transferable, but must be exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated;
and that an older law, of the Church itself, strictly barred the bishop
from exercising it. It was a very odd case, indeed.</p>
<p>It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way
in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion
House. A person who had not taken the Sacrament according to the
Anglican rite could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London. Thus
Dissenters were ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not
serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in
disguise, hit upon this neat device: they passed a by-law imposing a
fine of L400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff,
and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after being elected sheriff,
refused to serve. Then they went to work and elected a lot of
Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected
L15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Mansion House to this day,
to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when
a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that
has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good
and holy peoples that be in the earth.</p>
<p>The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's case was just as strong.
I did not see how the king was going to get out of this hole. But
he got out. I append his decision:</p>
<p>"Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a child's
affair for simpleness. An the young bride had conveyed notice, as in
duty bound, to her feudal lord and proper master and protector the bishop,
she had suffered no loss, for the said bishop could have got a
dispensation making him, for temporary conveniency, eligible to the
exercise of his said right, and thus would she have kept all she had.
Whereas, failing in her first duty, she hath by that failure failed
in all; for whoso, clinging to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must
fall; it being no defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound,
neither any deliverance from his peril, as he shall find. Pardy, the
woman's case is rotten at the source. It is the decree of the court
that she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the last
farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in the costs.
Next!"</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="25-319.jpg (150K)" src="images/25-319.jpg" width-obs="100%" /><br/></div>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months old.
Poor young creatures! They had lived these three months lapped
to the lips in worldly comforts. These clothes and trinkets they
were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch of the
sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree; and in these pretty
clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying to comfort her with
hopeful words set to the music of despair, they went from the judgment
seat out into the world homeless, bedless, breadless; why, the very
beggars by the roadsides were not so poor as they.</p>
<p>Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to the
Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt. Men write many
fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains
that where every man in a State has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
Arthur's people were of course poor material for a republic, because
they had been debased so long by monarchy; and yet even they would have
been intelligent enough to make short work of that law which the king had
just been administering if it had been submitted to their full and free
vote. There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's
mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning—the sense
and meaning implied when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to
this or that or the other nation as possibly being "capable of
self-government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a
nation somewhere, some time or other which <i>wasn't</i> capable of it—wasn't
as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would
be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have
sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the
mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes; and so, no
matter what the nation's intellectual grade was; whether high or low, the
bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor,
and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance
whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact:
that even the best governed and most free and most enlightened
monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people; and
that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way
down to the lowest.</p>
<p>King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond my
calculations. I had not supposed he would move in the matter while I
was away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining the merits
of officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise to submit every
candidate to a sharp and searching examination; and privately I meant to
put together a list of military qualifications that nobody could answer to
but my West Pointers. That ought to have been attended to before I
left; for the king was so taken with the idea of a standing army that he
couldn't wait but must get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme
of examination as he could invent out of his own head.</p>
<p>I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much more
admirable was the one which I should display to the Examining Board.
I intimated this, gently, to the king, and it fired his curiosity.
When the Board was assembled, I followed him in; and behind us came
the candidates. One of these candidates was a bright young West
Pointer of mine, and with him were a couple of my West Point professors.</p>
<p>When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh. The head
of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy King-at-Arms!
The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in his department; and
all three were priests, of course; all officials who had to know how to
read and write were priests.</p>
<p>My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head of the
Board opened on him with official solemnity:</p>
<p>"Name?"</p>
<p>"Mal-ease."</p>
<p>"Son of?"</p>
<p>"Webster."</p>
<p>"Webster—Webster. H'm—I—my memory faileth to
recall the name. Condition?"</p>
<p>"Weaver."</p>
<p>"Weaver!—God keep us!"</p>
<p>The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one clerk
fainted, and the others came near it. The chairman pulled himself
together, and said indignantly:</p>
<p>"It is sufficient. Get you hence."</p>
<p>But I appealed to the king. I begged that my candidate might be
examined. The king was willing, but the Board, who were all
well-born folk, implored the king to spare them the indignity of examining
the weaver's son. I knew they didn't know enough to examine him
anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs and the king turned the duty over
to my professors. I had had a blackboard prepared, and it was put up
now, and the circus began. It was beautiful to hear the lad lay out
the science of war, and wallow in details of battle and siege, of supply,
transportation, mining and countermining, grand tactics, big strategy and
little strategy, signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all
about siege guns, field guns, gatling guns, rifled guns, smooth bores,
musket practice, revolver practice—and not a solitary word of it all
could these catfish make head or tail of, you understand—and it was
handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the blackboard
that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like nothing, too—all
about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and constellations, and mean
time, and sidereal time, and dinner time, and bedtime, and every other
imaginable thing above the clouds or under them that you could harry or
bullyrag an enemy with and make him wish he hadn't come—and when the
boy made his military salute and stood aside at last, I was proud enough
to hug him, and all those other people were so dazed they looked partly
petrified, partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed under. I
judged that the cake was ours, and by a large majority.</p>
<p>Education is a great thing. This was the same youth who had come to
West Point so ignorant that when I asked him, "If a general officer should
have a horse shot under him on the field of battle, what ought he to do?"
answered up naively and said:</p>
<p>"Get up and brush himself."</p>
<p>One of the young nobles was called up now. I thought I would
question him a little myself. I said:</p>
<p>"Can your lordship read?"</p>
<p>His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:</p>
<p>"Takest me for a clerk? I trow I am not of a blood that—"</p>
<p>"Answer the question!"</p>
<p>He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer "No."</p>
<p>"Can you write?"</p>
<p>He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:</p>
<p>"You will confine yourself to the questions, and make no comments. You are
not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing of the sort will be
permitted. Can you write?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Do you know the multiplication table?"</p>
<p>"I wit not what ye refer to."</p>
<p>"How much is 9 times 6?"</p>
<p>"It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency
requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so,
not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge."</p>
<p>"If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth 2 pence the bushel, in exchange
for a sheep worth 4 pence and a dog worth a penny, and C kill the dog
before delivery, because bitten by the same, who mistook him for D, what
sum is still due to A from B, and which party pays for the dog, C or D,
and who gets the money? If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim
consequential damages in the form of additional money to represent the
possible profit which might have inured from the dog, and classifiable as
earned increment, that is to say, usufruct?"</p>
<p>"Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who moveth in
mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never heard the fellow to
this question for confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of
thought. Wherefore I beseech you let the dog and the onions and
these people of the strange and godless names work out their several
salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of
mine, for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried
to help I should but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live
myself to see the desolation wrought."</p>
<p>"What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?"</p>
<p>"If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate them whilst
that I lay sick about the beginning of the year and thereby failed to hear
his proclamation."</p>
<p>"What do you know of the science of optics?"</p>
<p>"I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and sheriffs of
counties, and many like small offices and titles of honor, but him you
call the Science of Optics I have not heard of before; peradventure it is
a new dignity."</p>
<p>"Yes, in this country."</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="25-322.jpg (56K)" src="images/25-322.jpg" width-obs="100%" /><br/></div>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official position,
of any kind under the sun! Why, he had all the earmarks of a
typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to contribute
uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation. It was
unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of that sort out of his
majestic supply of incapacity for the job. But that didn't prove
that he hadn't material in him for the disposition, it only proved that he
wasn't a typewriter copyist yet. After nagging him a little more, I
let the professors loose on him and they turned him inside out, on the
line of scientific war, and found him empty, of course. He knew
somewhat about the warfare of the time—bushwhacking around for
ogres, and bull-fights in the tournament ring, and such things—but
otherwise he was empty and useless. Then we took the other young
noble in hand, and he was the first one's twin, for ignorance and
incapacity. I delivered them into the hands of the chairman of the
Board with the comfortable consciousness that their cake was dough. They
were examined in the previous order of precedence.</p>
<p>"Name, so please you?"</p>
<p>"Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."</p>
<p>"Grandfather?"</p>
<p>"Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."</p>
<p>"Great-grandfather?"</p>
<p>"The same name and title."</p>
<p>"Great-great-grandfather?"</p>
<p>"We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing before it had reached so
far back."</p>
<p>"It mattereth not. It is a good four generations, and fulfilleth the
requirements of the rule."</p>
<p>"Fulfills what rule?" I asked.</p>
<p>"The rule requiring four generations of nobility or else the candidate is
not eligible."</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="25-326.jpg (59K)" src="images/25-326.jpg" width-obs="100%" /><br/></div>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>"A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can prove four
generations of noble descent?"</p>
<p>"Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned
without that qualification."</p>
<p>"Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing. What good is such a
qualification as that?"</p>
<p>"What good? It is a hardy question, fair sir and Boss, since it doth
go far to impugn the wisdom of even our holy Mother Church herself."</p>
<p>"As how?"</p>
<p>"For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding saints. By
her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead four generations."</p>
<p>"I see, I see—it is the same thing. It is wonderful. In
the one case a man lies dead-alive four generations—mummified in
ignorance and sloth—and that qualifies him to command live people,
and take their weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other
case, a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that
qualifies him for office in the celestial camp. Does the king's
grace approve of this strange law?"</p>
<p>The king said:</p>
<p>"Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange. All places of
honor and of profit do belong, by natural right, to them that be of noble
blood, and so these dignities in the army are their property and would be
so without this or any rule. The rule is but to mark a limit. Its
purpose is to keep out too recent blood, which would bring into contempt
these offices, and men of lofty lineage would turn their backs and scorn
to take them. I were to blame an I permitted this calamity. <i>You</i>
can permit it an you are minded so to do, for you have the delegated
authority, but that the king should do it were a most strange madness and
not comprehensible to any."</p>
<p>"I yield. Proceed, sir Chief of the Herald's College."</p>
<p>The chairman resumed as follows:</p>
<p>"By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the Throne and State did
the founder of your great line lift himself to the sacred dignity of the
British nobility?"</p>
<p>"He built a brewery."</p>
<p>"Sire, the Board finds this candidate perfect in all the requirements and
qualifications for military command, and doth hold his case open for
decision after due examination of his competitor."</p>
<p>The competitor came forward and proved exactly four generations of
nobility himself. So there was a tie in military qualifications that
far.</p>
<p>He stood aside a moment, and Sir Pertipole was questioned further:</p>
<p>"Of what condition was the wife of the founder of your line?"</p>
<p>"She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she was not noble; she was
gracious and pure and charitable, of a blameless life and character,
insomuch that in these regards was she peer of the best lady in the land."</p>
<p>"That will do. Stand down." He called up the competing
lordling again, and asked: "What was the rank and condition of the
great-grandmother who conferred British nobility upon your great house?"</p>
<p>"She was a king's leman and did climb to that splendid eminence by her own
unholpen merit from the sewer where she was born."</p>
<p>"Ah, this, indeed, is true nobility, this is the right and perfect
intermixture. The lieutenancy is yours, fair lord. Hold it not
in contempt; it is the humble step which will lead to grandeurs more
worthy of the splendor of an origin like to thine."</p>
<p>I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation. I had promised
myself an easy and zenith-scouring triumph, and this was the outcome!</p>
<p>I was almost ashamed to look my poor disappointed cadet in the face.
I told him to go home and be patient, this wasn't the end.</p>
<p>I had a private audience with the king, and made a proposition. I said it
was quite right to officer that regiment with nobilities, and he couldn't
have done a wiser thing. It would also be a good idea to add five
hundred officers to it; in fact, add as many officers as there were nobles
and relatives of nobles in the country, even if there should finally be
five times as many officers as privates in it; and thus make it the crack
regiment, the envied regiment, the King's Own regiment, and entitled to
fight on its own hook and in its own way, and go whither it would and come
when it pleased, in time of war, and be utterly swell and independent.
This would make that regiment the heart's desire of all the nobility, and
they would all be satisfied and happy. Then we would make up the
rest of the standing army out of commonplace materials, and officer it
with nobodies, as was proper—nobodies selected on a basis of mere
efficiency—and we would make this regiment toe the line, allow it no
aristocratic freedom from restraint, and force it to do all the work and
persistent hammering, to the end that whenever the King's Own was tired
and wanted to go off for a change and rummage around amongst ogres and
have a good time, it could go without uneasiness, knowing that matters
were in safe hands behind it, and business going to be continued at the
old stand, same as usual. The king was charmed with the idea.</p>
<p>When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion. I thought I saw
my way out of an old and stubborn difficulty at last. You see, the
royalties of the Pendragon stock were a long-lived race and very fruitful.
Whenever a child was born to any of these—and it was pretty
often—there was wild joy in the nation's mouth, and piteous sorrow
in the nation's heart. The joy was questionable, but the grief was
honest. Because the event meant another call for a Royal Grant.
Long was the list of these royalties, and they were a heavy and
steadily increasing burden upon the treasury and a menace to the crown.
Yet Arthur could not believe this latter fact, and he would not
listen to any of my various projects for substituting something in the
place of the royal grants. If I could have persuaded him to now and
then provide a support for one of these outlying scions from his own
pocket, I could have made a grand to-do over it, and it would have had a
good effect with the nation; but no, he wouldn't hear of such a thing.
He had something like a religious passion for royal grant; he seemed
to look upon it as a sort of sacred swag, and one could not irritate him
in any way so quickly and so surely as by an attack upon that venerable
institution. If I ventured to cautiously hint that there was not
another respectable family in England that would humble itself to hold out
the hat—however, that is as far as I ever got; he always cut me
short there, and peremptorily, too.</p>
<p>But I believed I saw my chance at last. I would form this crack
regiment out of officers alone—not a single private. Half of
it should consist of nobles, who should fill all the places up to
Major-General, and serve gratis and pay their own expenses; and they would
be glad to do this when they should learn that the rest of the regiment
would consist exclusively of princes of the blood. These princes of the
blood should range in rank from Lieutenant-General up to Field Marshal,
and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and fed by the state. Moreover—and
this was the master stroke—it should be decreed that these princely
grandees should be always addressed by a stunningly gaudy and
awe-compelling title (which I would presently invent), and they and they
only in all England should be so addressed. Finally, all princes of
the blood should have free choice; join that regiment, get that great
title, and renounce the royal grant, or stay out and receive a grant.
Neatest touch of all: unborn but imminent princes of the blood
could be <i>born</i> into the regiment, and start fair, with good wages
and a permanent situation, upon due notice from the parents.</p>
<p>All the boys would join, I was sure of that; so, all existing grants would
be relinquished; that the newly born would always join was equally
certain. Within sixty days that quaint and bizarre anomaly, the
Royal Grant, would cease to be a living fact, and take its place among the
curiosities of the past.</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<div class="fig"> <ANTIMG alt="26-331.jpg (76K)" src="images/26-331.jpg" width-obs="100%" /><br/></div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />