King John of Jingalo Part 10

"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 b.u.t.toning 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 cla.s.ses 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 const.i.tutionally 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sisted 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 const.i.tuencies 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 Const.i.tution 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 att.i.tude, 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 doc.u.ments requiring my a.s.sent, 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 doc.u.ments, besides mere commissions, t.i.tles, 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, n.o.body 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.