The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0129/01291.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 25KB | 484 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01291}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 25}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{king
regiment
own
upon
blood
case
even
himself
time
army
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1889}
$Log{See King Arthur*0129101.scf
}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 25

A Competitive Examination

     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.

     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 thing, 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 judgment 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.

     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 seignory 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 seignory - 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 seignory 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.

     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 bylaw imposing a fine of 400 Pounds
upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of
600 Pounds 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 15,000 Pounds 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.

     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:

     "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!"

     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.

     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, sometime or other which wasn't 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