King John of Jingalo

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"You are pushing your definition of impediments rather far when you plan
a new thoroughfare, giving strangers the entree to church premises."

"It is really your definition of 'premises,'" said the Prime Minister,
"over which we are chiefly at issue. What right has the Church to regard
as strangers any who are baptized Christians?"

The Archbishop seized his advantage exultingly. "I will only remind
you," said he, "of the Church Government Act--a measure of no ancient
date--by which Parliament forced the Church to expel from benefice those
who would not accept her discipline in matters of outward observance.
You yourself voted for that measure."

The Prime Minister had to acknowledge the stroke; but he made light of
it. "I think that measure has already become obsolete. It was not put
very thoroughly into practice even at the beginning."

"Let Parliament, then, admit its error," said the Archbishop, "and
abolish the act and the principle which it enshrines before proceeding
with other acts diametrically opposed to it. While the law claims a hold
over the Church, the Church claims to hold by existing law."

"I may possibly, then, satisfy your Grace," insinuated the Premier, "if
presently I propose the restoration of certain Free Church ministers by
episcopal consecration to the fold from which they were expelled."

The Archbishop rose to his feet, and raising the presentation Bible high
over his head brought it down upon the table with a bang. Then
instantaneously conceiving his mistake, he laid his hands over it in the
act of blessing.

"Never!" he said firmly and solemnly, with ever deepening inflection of
tone, "never! never!"

"It is a measure that might be avoided," conceded the Prime Minister.
"The alternative is before you. We have made you our offer."

"You have offered," said the Archbishop, "an alternative which I am not
able to discuss. Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism in alternate doses
is the price you ask us to pay. The Church of Jingalo will accept
neither the Triple Crown nor an untriune Divinity as its guide." He drew
himself to his full height. "That, sir, is her answer."

"So you really think," inquired the Prime Minister, "that yours and the
Church's voice are one?"

"The blood of her martyrs," said the Archbishop, "has stained the very
steps of that throne from which under divine Providence I am
commissioned to speak with authority. I call on them to witness that
never in her hour of need shall the Church surrender her divine mission
to preach only pure doctrine and to defend the faith committed to the
saints."

"I thought," said the Prime Minister, "that, officially at least, you
did not invoke the dead."

"Sir, we have no need. Their record is our inheritance. It is they who
invoke us from an imperishable past."

"Our discussion, then, seems to be at an end. We have gone back into the
middle ages."

The Prime Minister, having got very much the answer he expected, here
rose and began buttoning his coat. "Well, Archbishop," said he, as he
thus trimmed himself to give a neat finish to the discussion, "before we
part I will put the question quite frankly: Is it to be peace or war?"

"I am a servant of the Church Militant," answered his Grace.

And then they compared notes and settled dates as to when war was to be
declared. Jingalo was about to exhibit to the world the continuity of
her institutions, and with her mind thus carried back to ancient times
modern controversy was an anachronism.

It was on those historic grounds that they arranged their armistice; but
Recording Angels are more truthful than Archbishops or Prime Ministers;
and the Recording Angel, having listened to their conversation, was led
to set down upon his tables this notable memorandum--that on no account
were popular pageantry or trade interests to be disturbed during so
golden an opportunity as the Silver Jubilee. While that was going on
defense of Church and State must be relegated to obscurity.

III

All this had taken place before the truce actually began (see, in fact,
Chapter II). How much, or rather how little the King had heard of it we
already know. How little the truce brought benefit to him we shall learn
more fully in later chapters. Still for the moment he was not without
comfort, for he had got Max to talk to. Every evening that they spent
together much talk went on; and the King sat infected and edified while
Maxian oratory flowed.

"How is it," inquired his father, "that you have been able to think of
these things? I see them when you tell me; but how did they ever come to
enter your head?"

"For some years," answered Max, "I had the advantage of being your
youngest son. Until I was twenty, two lives stood between me and the
succession, and while Stephen and Rupert were drilling I managed to get
educated."

"Poor Rupert!" murmured his father, "he would have made a much better
King than either of us."

"I don't think so," said Max. "He would merely have kept the monarchy to
its old lines--that means sticking in a rut. If the monarchy is to mean
anything it will have to move, not merely with the times but ahead of
them."

"How can it move ahead of them?"

"How otherwise can it lead? That is what the heads of the privileged
classes never seem to understand. Look at the Bishops! See what a
spectacle they have made of themselves, all through not leading."

"Ah, yes," sighed the King; "I thought you'd be against the Bishops."

"Against them?" cried Max, "of course I'm against them! The Bishops are
a set of prehistoric remains: and even if they were all up to date, a
combined house of Bishops and Judges with full legislative powers is
antediluvian (I'm speaking of the Deluge now in the sense in which Louis
XV spoke of it)--it's an eighteenth-century arrangement.

"Yes, I'm against the Bishops, but I'm much more against the Cabinet.
The Cabinet is seeking to control not only the Upper but the Lower
Chamber as well, it is fighting the Bishops merely to delude the people;
and there are the Laity so stupid, or so lazy, or so corrupt that they
won't see it. Every one knows that the Government sells honors for party
purposes, and then covers it up by pretending that contributions to the
party funds are 'public services.' Everything now is to be had for a
price, a Chancellery at so much, a Knighthood at so much more; an Order
of the this, that, or the other, in exact proportion to its prestige or
its rarity. Last year they had a debate on it in the House, a debate
where, between them, the corruptors and the corrupted were in a
majority! And they solemnly took a vote on it, and declared that there
was no corruption, though everybody knew it to be a fact. The Opposition
lay low because they mean to do exactly the same when their time comes.
Oh, and it's not only the House of Laity: I daresay a bishopric has got
its price if we only knew!"

The King would have rejected such a suggestion as fantastic only a month
ago; but now with the Archimandrite in his mind he began to be
suspicious. What price, monetary or political, might not the Free
Churchmen be paying for their bishoprics, what secret bargain of which
it was no one's duty to inform him? He lashed at his own impotence, for
the ignominy of his position increased with his growing consciousness.
Here was the Prime Minister respectful but compulsive, able to threaten,
to browbeat, to dictate terms; but he himself had no counter means to
extract from that minister on what terms he was consenting to do these
things or what price he was paying to get them done. How
constitutionally was he to obtain knowledge of anything? And still,
piling up the accusation, the voice of Max went on.

"I presume," said he, "that quite lately a list of Jubilee honors has
been submitted to you for approval. What does your approval mean? Is a
single one of them your own selection? Do you know what the majority of
them are for?"

The King shook his head. "Mostly they are political," said he. "The
Government has the right; I have no call to interfere. Isn't it perhaps
better that I should not interfere?"

"It may be arguable, sir, that the uncomfortably high position to which
we are born cuts us off from the more strenuously fermenting issues of
the political game, and from the malignities and hypocrisies of that
party system of which, as a nation, we pretend to be so proud, and are
secretly so much ashamed. It may be well that some single authority
should stand removed from and above party, if in the hands of that
authority there is also left power of sentence and dismissal, power also
to withhold unmerited reward. But that power you are no longer expected
to exercise,--it lies like a china nest-egg never to be hatched, but
only to promote the laying of other eggs.

"Yet while your prerogatives have been thus diminished, the claim that
you shall act with judicial impartiality has increased, and has become a
fetter. To oppose any course of ministerial action to-day is by
implication to ally yourself with the other side. You are in the
position of a judge whose directions the jury has authority to ignore,
and from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically
been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by
the will, not of the people, but of that class or section which in the
evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling
one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another
the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in
the future, that peace-loving, industrial democracy which to-day we are
still striving to hold back from its aim. These ruling powers of the
past have now concentrated on the Cabinet as their last line of defense;
and so at the present day it is the Cabinet which has the largest
control not only of patronage (much of it corruptly applied), but of
certain penalizing devices by which monetary pressure can be brought
upon those who thwart its will. By its practical usurpation of the
Crown's right to decree a general election, and by its control of the
party funds, from which parliamentary candidates are subsidized and
assisted to the poll, it is able to hold over the heads of its
supporters a financial threat to which very few can remain indifferent.
And this is how our so-called popular chamber is manipulated and run.
The power of the purse (I speak now of the moneys voted for public
service) lies almost entirely in the hands of those who themselves have
the largest monetary interest for keeping away from their constituencies
and maintaining their leaders in power; and as a consequence the
Ministry's evasion of all regulations and safeguards, its increasing
seizure of parliamentary time, its postponement of finance to a date in
each session when the legislature's energies are exhausted, have become
more and more corrupt in character. Why, the very minister whose duty it
is to see that members are constant in their voting and their attendance
is the one with whom lies, if not the distribution of patronage, at
least its recommendation. He is the go-between, and they know it. How
likely, then, are the rank and file to throw their Government out of
office when the immediate result will be not only to transfer these
bribes to the hands of their political opponents but to inflict upon
themselves the cost of a contested election which privately they cannot
afford, and to face which they are accordingly obliged to go, cap in
hand, to the very men they have voted from power, but who still have
absolute control of the party organization and its funds?"

Here Max stopped to take breath.

IV

"But can you suggest any other way?" questioned the King. "Surely we
must have party?"

"I have no reason to suggest it," answered his son, "it stands written
in history. Under our more ancient Constitution the House of Laity came
pledged from its electorate to criticise, and to control (by the giving
or withholding of supply) the acts of a separate and administratively
independent body. Now Government is carried on by an administrative
body, which, though nominally dependent, has at its back a majority of
the elected pledged _not_ to criticise. And the difference between the
two systems is as the difference between darkness and light. That body
is now forcing the monarchy also into the same non-critical attitude, or
at least is securing that the criticism shall be impotent of result. And
I have the right, sir, to ask what are you doing to-day to preserve for
me the powers which you inherited?"

"To tell you the truth, my son," answered the King, "it is only lately
that I have begun trying to find out what those powers are. It seems a
strange confession to make after twenty-five years; but it is true. When
I came to the throne, at a moment of great political changes, I was
entirely uninstructed and quite naturally I made mistakes, letting
things go when I was told to. From that false position successive
ministries have never allowed me to escape; they have kept me (I have
only just found it out) as uninstructed as they possibly could. They
burden me with routine work, they busy my hands while starving my brain.
One of their little ways--done on the score of relieving me of
unnecessary trouble--has been to submit in large batches at intervals
important documents requiring my assent, smuggling them in under cover
of others. And when I find it out, they plead unavoidable delay and
urgency, as though it were quite an exception. But I tell you it has
been going on, oh, dear me, yes, for a long time now; and the General
has known of it as well as any of them! The other day I made one of my
secretaries go through the entries, and I find that in the last year I
signed sixty Acts of Parliament and about fifteen hundred other State
documents, besides mere commissions, titles, diplomas, and all that sort
of thing, and I tell you that I haven't a ghost of a notion of what more
than a dozen were about! They don't give me time to digest anything; and
you are quite right, it's a system!"

"Well," said his son, "at least they don't treat you much worse than
they do the people's representatives. It has become their regular plan
now to bring in six bills all rolled into one, in a form far too big and
complicated ever to be properly discussed. They insert a lot of
unnecessary contentiousness at the beginning, and all the really
administrative part--the machinery which provides them with political
handles throughout the country, and which they call the non-contentious
part--at the end; and then--on the score of it being non-contentious,
and because by the time they get to it the mind of the legislature is
exhausted--then they shut it down with the closure. One result is that
we have laws on the statute-book which don't even make grammar. Only
last session the Minister of Education got a bill sent up to the
Spiritual Chamber with three split infinitives in it."

"What is a split infinitive?" inquired his Majesty.

"Merely a grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be
whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to
the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their
opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of
Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew up this bill."

"Do you mean that some one paid him to put in the split infinitives?"
inquired the King anxiously.

"That was quite unnecessary; the thing paid for itself; good drafting
is never to the legal interest. But what I wanted to say was this: here,
in a House of educated men dealing with education, nobody troubled to
correct the grammar of the thing. That to my mind stands out as a moral
portent of the first magnitude. The Bishops quite rightly sent it back
again, but for the wrong reason. Their reason was pure blind
obscurantism; if they had returned it because of its split infinitives
and its slovenly drafting, and requested that it should be put into
decent Jingalese so that they might pretend to understand it they would
have had all the enlightened educationalists in the country with them.
As it was they were against them. It is curious how the Spiritual
Chamber always seeks its popularity among the fools instead of the wise.
It treats democracy like a dog with a bad name, and yet it is to the
dog's tail that it pins its faith: and so it wags with the tail."

The King was not happy at hearing the Bishops so abused; and now a word
had fallen from his son's lips which enabled him to change the subject
to a point which more immediately concerned him.

"Max," said he, "answer me truly, I don't want flattery. Do you think
that _I_ am popular?"

The young man viewed his father leniently, indulgently even; the worn,
fussy, over-anxious face appealed to his sense of pity. "Oh, yes, I
believe so," he said. "They think you are trying to do your best and all
that sort of thing. You don't enthuse them as my grandfather used to do;
but, then, he had the grand manner, and the grand way of speaking as if
he were an oracle. You have put all that aside--except when you make
speeches which have been written for you by your ministers. Well, decent
people respect you for it; but it has its drawbacks; the crowd prefers
the other thing occasionally;--it likes still to pretend, at moments of
ceremony, that it believes in divine right and the hereditary principle,
and so forth; and where it likes to pretend, the press and the
Government are always ready to play into its hands. Yes; it's a
mixture; you must attend sometimes to the unrealities,--then, with your
real moments, you get your effect."

"Your grandfather," said the King, "never talked to me about anything.
He didn't like the idea of being succeeded, hated to think of a time
when affairs would have to go on without him. I fancy that he rather
despised my mental capacity, or else thought that by just looking at him
I should learn. So he never talked to me--not on these subjects I mean;
and I am still not sure whether I ought to talk to you. I don't really
know where State secrets begin and where they end, or whether I have the
right to say anything of what goes on in Council to a single living
soul. I wanted to consult the Archbishop the other day--merely to hear
his statement of the case from his own side--but I was not allowed. I am
the most solitary man in my kingdom; and am kept so, in order that I may
remain powerless."

"As Charlotte would say," observed Max, "we haven't taught each other
the business. And yet, isn't it strange? Here are we, a long-established
firm ('limited, entire,' I suppose we should describe ourselves),
existing upon the hereditary principle, and yet not allowed to extract
any of its living values. As detached forces we succeed each other upon
the throne, each in turn reduced in power and initiative by our official
training and our inexperience. When shall we learn to organize our labor
and combine like the rest of the world?"

"I think we are combining now," said the King.

"Yes," said Max, "I really believe we are--'John Jingalo and Son'--how
nice and commercial that sounds!"

"I only hope the Prime Minister won't hear of it."

"I hope he will," said Max.

CHAPTER VI

OF THINGS NOT EXPECTED

I

"Charlotte!" cried the King, aghast, "what on earth is the meaning of
this?"

"What is it, papa?" inquired the Princess innocently.

His Majesty shook at her the paper he had just been reading. "You have
promised a hundred pounds donation to the Anti-vivisection Society! Here
it is in large headlines: 'The Princess Royal supports the
Anti-vivisectionists!'"

"Well, so I do."

"But you mustn't," said her mother.

Princess Charlotte made a face--rather a pretty one.

"I can't help having my opinions, mamma."

"Then you mustn't express them--not publicly."

"If I am not to express them," argued the Princess, "why do you send me
into public at all? Isn't laying foundation-stones and opening bazaars a
public expression of opinion? Don't I go because you approve of them?"

"That is a very different matter," said her mother. "Good objects like
those no one can possibly object to."

"But I think anti-vivisection a good object."

"I don't care what you think," said her father, "you are perfectly free
to think as you like. What I want to know is--who do you suppose is
going to pay that hundred pounds?"

"You are, papa." She smiled on him sweetly.

"Indeed, your father will do nothing of the sort!" interposed the Queen,
while the King was still opening his mouth in wonder at the suggestion.

"If he will only make me an allowance, he needn't," said Charlotte; and
while her parents were giving weight to that pronouncement she went on.

"I am going to promise a hundred pounds to every deserving charity you
send me to; and if you leave off sending me, I shall write and offer it.
It will be in all the papers--it will become the recognized
thing--people will begin to look for it,--me and my hundred pounds. And
as soon as it is the recognized thing, you know quite well, papa, that
you will have to pay."

"Why do you disapprove of vivisection?" inquired her father, finding
this frontal attack unmanageable.

"Just a fellow-feeling, I suppose, through being myself a victim. Oh, I
don't say there's any torture involved, but now and again mamma gives me
an anesthetic, and when I wake up I find something has been done that I
don't like--something vital taken off me."

"Nonsense!" said the Queen, "I never do anything of the kind."

But this statement corresponded so startlingly to his Majesty's own
experience that he began to pay closer attention.

"When have I done it?" demanded the Queen.

"The last time was when you sent me to spend three weeks with Aunt
Sophie in order to develop a taste for foreign missions. It didn't
succeed. And when I came back you had changed my suite of rooms without
asking me; and I was done out of my balcony!"

"I found her," the Queen explained, "going down by the balcony in the
early morning, while the gardeners were still about, to gather flowers."

"I didn't talk to the gardeners."

"You went out when I told you not to."

"You see!" appealed Charlotte, "she does vivisect me. Last time Aunt
Sophie was the anesthetic: sometimes it's even worse. You don't hear of
these things, papa, because I don't often complain; but there they are.
And mamma is so pleased with herself about it--that's what tries me!"

"Charlotte," said her father, "that's not pretty--that's not
respectful."

"No, but it's true."

The Queen attempted a diversion. "Why do you want an allowance? I give
you pocket-money, and you get all the dresses you need."

"I get a great many more," admitted Charlotte; "but I don't get one that
I really like."

"That shows your want of taste."

"Of course, I haven't your taste, mamma, you can't expect it; and what's
too good for me doesn't suit me."

But this obliquity of speech missed its point, for of her own taste the
Queen had no doubt whatever.

"But, my dear child," interposed the King, "do try to be reasonable!
Whatever allowance we made you, you couldn't go on giving a hundred
pounds to every charity. You'd have all the benevolent societies in the
kingdom flocking about you; life wouldn't be worth living."

"Oh, I know that, papa," said the Princess, "I'm not charitable in the
least. I'm only doing it to bring pressure on you; I haven't any other
reason whatever."

At this brazen avowal the Queen gasped; but his Majesty became more
sympathetic.

"I wanted," she went on, "to do it as nicely and respectably as
possible, and I thought to give you away in charity was better than
gambling or anything of that sort. Not that I haven't been tempted; for
you know, papa, I could quite easily lose you a hundred pounds at every
tea-party I go to. But now, if I'm asked to a bridge-table, all I can
say is, 'Papa won't make me an allowance, so I can't play for money.'"

"Surely you don't say that!" cried the Queen in horror.

"No," answered the Princess slyly, "but I can say it. And, of course, I
shall have to say it to the charities and the anti-vivisectionists if
papa doesn't pay up. There'll be headlines about that, too," she added
reflectively. "You see, I am in the business now that I've begun helping
at sales."

The King got up from his seat, and began to pace the room. For the first
time he had discovered in his daughter's character a resemblance to Max,
and much as he was beginning to love certain mental values which his son
possessed, it rather frightened him to see them cropping up in his
daughter.

"Charlotte," he said, in a tone of affectionate appeal, "when have I
ever denied you anything that was right and reasonable?"

"Never, dearest papa, never!" said his daughter. "And I'm sure you are
not going to begin now. It's too late," she added mischievously.

Yes. It was too late. The King knew it. He had known it from the moment
the discussion started. Even the Queen was beginning to know it.
Charlotte, sweet, smiling, and determined, held them in the hollow of
her hand. Newspaper headlines, if properly manipulated, will defeat in
its own domestic circle any monarchy that is now existing.

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