The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0127/01276.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 10KB | 168 lines

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$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 10}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{now
time
years
country
hand
human
kingdom
perfect
schools
}
$Date{1889}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 10

Beginnings Of Civilization

     The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a good
deal discussed, for such things interested the boys.  The king thought I
ought now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown
and be the more worthy to meet Sir Sagramor when the several years should
have rolled away.  I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me
three or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then
I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that time Sir
Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by
the postponement; I should then have been in office six or seven years, and I
believed my system and machinery would be so well developed that I could take
a holiday without its working any harm.

     I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished.  In
various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of
industries under way - nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel
missionaries of my future civilization.  In these were gathered together the
brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country
for more, all the time.  I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts
- experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.  These nurseries
of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure
country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts without
a special permit - for I was afraid of the Church.

     I had started a teacher factory and a lot of Sunday schools the first
thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full
blast in those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant
congregations all in a prosperous and growing condition.  Everybody could be
any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that
matter.  But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the
Sunday schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings.
I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a
Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law
of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human
family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is
only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment
whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the
spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears
it; and besides I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the
mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as
it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to
human thought.

     All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them.  They
had formerly been worked as savages always work mines - holes grubbed in the
earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by hand, at the rate of a
ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining on a scientific basis as early
as I could.

     Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's challenge
struck me.

     Four years rolled by - and then!  Well, you would never imagine it in
the world.  Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands.  The
despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government.  An earthly
despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the
conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the
human race, and his lease of life perpetual.  But as a perishable perfect man
must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an
earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst
form that is possible.

     My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom
at his command.  Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the civilization of the
nineteenth century booming under its very nose!  It was fenced away from the
public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact - and to be
heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck.  There it was, as sure a fact, and
as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its
smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its
bowels.  My schools and churches were children four years before; they were
grown-up, now; my shops of that day were vast factories, now; where I had a
dozen trained men then, I had a thousand, now; where I had one brilliant
expert then, I had fifty now.  I stood with my hand on the cock, so to speak,
ready to turn it on and flood the midnight world with light at any moment.
But I was not going to do the thing in that sudden way.  It was not my
policy.  The people could not have stood it; and moreover I should have had
the Established Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute.

     No, I had been going cautiously all the while.  I had had confidential
agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was to undermine
knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a little at this and that
and the other superstition, and so prepare the way gradually for a better
order of things.  I was turning on my light one candlepower at a time, and
meant to continue to do so.

     I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom, and they
were doing very well.  I meant to work this racket more and more, as time
wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me.  One of my deepest secrets was
my West Point - my military academy.  I kept that most jealously out of
sight; and I did the same with my naval academy which I had established at a
remote seaport.  Both were prospering to my satisfaction.

     Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my right hand.
He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn't anything he couldn't
turn his hand to.  Of late I had been training him for journalism, for the
time seemed about right for a start in the newspaper line; nothing big, but
just a small weekly for experimental circulation in my
civilization-nurseries.  He took to it like a duck; there was an editor
concealed in him, sure.  Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked
sixth century and wrote nineteenth.  His journalistic style was climbing,
steadily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama mark, and couldn't
be told from the editorial output of that region either by matter or flavor.

     We had another large departure on hand, too.  This was a telegraph and a
telephone; our first venture in this line.  These wires were for private
service only, as yet, and must be kept private until a riper day should come.
We had a gang of men on the road, working mainly by night.  They were
stringing ground wires; we were afraid to put up poles, for they would attract
too much inquiry.  Ground wires were good enough, in both instances, for my
wires were protected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect.
My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and establishing
connection with any considerable towns whose lights betrayed their presence,
and leaving experts in charge.  Nobody could tell you how to find any place in
the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally to any place, but only struck
it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without thinking
to inquire what its name was.  At one time and another we had sent out
topographical expeditions to survey and map the kingdom, but the priests had
always interfered and raised trouble.  So we had given th