King John of Jingalo Part 64

Presently the word "strikes" caught his ear.

"Ah, yes, what about those strikes?" he inquired.

"They are still going on, your Majesty."

"Yes, _I_ know that! Why are they going on--that's what I want to know?

The strike you are talking about was practically over more than a month ago; why has it begun again?"

"They have secured fresh funds, sir, and other trades have joined in."

"Is it the other trades that are finding the funds?"

"Not entirely, sir; large contributions are now coming in from abroad."

"From abroad?" interjected the King irritably, "where are they getting funds from abroad?"

"From England, sir."

"From the Government, do you mean?"

"Of course not from the Government, sir."

"Well, explain yourself, then! Don't call it England if it isn't England."

"I might almost say that it is England, sir, since a judicial decision is the immediate cause of it. Labor in that country has just won a very important action for damages arising out of a Crown prosecution. It has now been decided that the Crown is responsible for the torts of its civil and military agents. The unions in consequence are flush with funds, and a portion of the Court's award, amounting to 50,000, has been handed over to the strike fund in this country."

"And this subsidy from a foreign and a so-called friendly Power is having the effect of prolonging our industrial conflicts, and is doing damage to our trade?"

"Undoubtedly, sir, it has that effect."

"Well, and has nothing been said about it--to the English Government, I mean?"

"It is not a direct act of the Government, sir."

"I don't need to be told that," said the King. "Neither was it a direct act of the Government when a party of English undergraduates climbed to the top of our emba.s.sy and hauled down the national flag because Jingalese had been made a compulsory subst.i.tute for Greek at their universities. But for that the English Government apologized, publicly and privately, and all round. Do they apologize for this? Do they offer to compensate us for the loss it is to our trade and the corresponding gain to theirs? Have they been asked to apologize?"

"Certainly not, sir."

"And pray, why not?"

By this time, around the ministerial board, much open-eyed interrogation was going on. Where, they seemed to be asking, was this glut of foolish interrogations going to end? But still the minister under examination endeavored to answer as though the questions were reasonable.

"There would be no chance, sir, of obtaining any redress."

"Yet this is doing us infinitely more harm?"

"It is merely a development, sir, of that new thing called 'syndicalism.' It is cropping up everywhere now."

"It may be new as it likes," protested the King. "All I say is that as it stands it is a casus belli. You say it is cropping up; all the more reason why it should be put down! What else is government for? Take cattle disease; you put that down, you do not allow that to be imported.

Why should you allow syndicalism to be imported either?"

The Council sought resignation of spirit in sighs and looked to its Chief in mute appeal.

"How would your Majesty propose to prevent the importation of ideas?"

inquired the Prime Minister dryly, in a tone that tried to be patient.

"Don't tell me," said the King, "that a syndicalist subsidy to Labor of 50,000 is only an idea. But you are quite right, Mr. Prime Minister; in the past countries have gone to war largely over the importation of ideas, as you call them, either religious or social; that is why they failed. England went to war with France at the end of the eighteenth century merely because France was importing revolutionary ideas into England. Was she able to prevent it? No; she only got the disease in a much more virulent form herself, and has been running tandem to it ever since. It is no use going to war for sentimental reasons; you must do it for business reasons, and you must do it in a business-like way."

"Merely as a matter of business, sir," said the Prime Minister, his hopefulness now on a descending scale, "war with England would cost us considerably more than the loss of trade occasioned by this subsidy which you complain of."

"Not a bit of it!" retorted the King, "not if you went the right way to work. The Chancellor was saying just now that we should have to devise some fresh taxes. Well, put a tax on Englishmen; quite enough of them come here to make it worth while. Every summer the place is alive with them!"

"I am afraid, sir," said the Prime Minister, sighing wearily, "that the most favored nation clause stands in the way of your Majesty's brilliant suggestion."

"Not if we do it openly as an act of war," explained the King; "then it becomes a war tax. That's what I mean when I say conduct your wars on business lines. Don't tax yourself, tax your enemy! England is the one country we can fight on our own terms. She can't get at us. We are an inland power; there isn't a coast within three hundred miles of us; and Dreadnoughts can't walk on land, you know. They really can't!" he added, as though there might be some doubt among those who had not yet given the matter their consideration.

"I a.s.sure you, gentlemen, that war on England, if scientifically conducted, would be a profitable thing. I've been reading a book by a man named Norman Angell, who says that war doesn't pay. Well, the reason for that is we don't conduct our wars on the proper lines. Now if we made war on England----"

"Your Majesty," entreated the Prime Minister, "may we proceed to business?"

"If we made war on England," persisted the King, "we should not have to send out a single regiment, or impose any extra taxation on ourselves; in fact we should save. We should simply raise our railway and hotel tariffs fifteen or twenty per cent. to all Englishmen, except children in arms; children up to thirteen half price. There's the whole thing in a nutsh.e.l.l; no difficulty, no difficulty whatever."

At this point, to the Premier's annoyance, Professor Teller took up the question with a humorous appreciation of its possibilities.

"But, sir," he inquired, "how should we know that they were Englishmen?

They might disguise themselves as Americans."

"They couldn't!" said the King. "An Englishman trying to talk American makes as poor an exhibition of himself as an American trying to talk English; and besides, you don't know the British character! Penalize them in the way I am suggesting and they would flaunt their nationality in our faces; they would wear Union-jack waistcoats and carry in their pockets gramophones which played 'G.o.d save the King' when you touched them. They would make a point of showing us that they didn't care twopence for our fifteen per cent.; in fact, their Tariff Reformers would applaud us--they would put it in large headlines in all their newspapers, and call it an object lesson and would demand a general election on the strength of it."

"But supposing, sir," inquired the Professor, "that they did not come at all? We have to remember that we live largely by our tourists; and if we eliminate the English tourist----"

"Better and better," said the King. "Think how popular we should be with the rest of Europe! No English? The Germans would simply flock to us; our hotels would be crammed; we should be turning away money at the door."

The Prime Minister tapped wearily upon the table; all this was such utter waste of time; and he began to think that the King was so intending it, and was bent upon making a royal Council a const.i.tutional impossibility.

But in some curious magnetic way other members of the Cabinet were now beginning to be infected. The idea tickled their national vanity; and though it was all put in a very amateurish way, many of them saw well enough that for war to be retained as a solution of international problems something on these lines would have to be done for it.

Syndicalism was merely a showing of the way.

"But, your Majesty," inquired the President of the Board of Ways and Means, "might not England retaliate by declaring a Tariff war on us?"

"She might," said the King; "but not with the Liberals still in power; they couldn't reduce themselves to absurdity in that way. Still, supposing our declaration of war threw the Liberals out, what could the others do? Our trade in English goods comes to us mainly through France or Germany; and our own return trade is chiefly limited to our native crockery, toys, wood-carving, and needlework, supposed survivals of our peasant industries, which, as a matter of fact, are nearly all of them manufactured for us in Birmingham, the home of Tariff Reform. In that matter, by the taxing of articles which are only nominally made in Jingalo, English trade would suffer more than ours; and there might, in consequence, come about a real revival of our native crafts (an advantage which I had not previously thought of)--lacking our usual supply of the bogus article we should at last become honest in our professions and truthful in our trademarks. Let the Minister for Home Industries make a note of it."

"The prospect your Majesty holds out is certainly alluring," replied the minister thus appealed to; "but if war is to teach us moral lessons, surely we ought to have moral reasons for engaging in it as well as business ones."

"Well, if you want them, you've got them!" said the King. "If moral reasons were to count we ought to have been at war with England any day for the last fifty years. England has become--if she has not always been--a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous experiment on which we have embarked has come from her. By her gross mismanagement of established inst.i.tutions--the Church, the Peerage, the Army, Land, Labor, Capital--the whole system of voluntary service and voluntary education--she has driven the rest of Europe into revolutionary changes for which there was no necessity whatever. In avoiding the woeful example she has set us, of always standing still on the wrong leg, we have run ourselves off both our own. And now she is nourishing syndicalism like a bed of weeds, and sowing the seeds of it into her neighbors' territories. If you are looking for moral excuse there is no end to it; I preferred, however, to put it to you as a business proposition."

"I must a.s.sure your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "that your Majesty's present advisers have no intention whatever of making themselves responsible for a war on England, however advantageous the circ.u.mstances may seem."

He might as well have spoken to the wind; with an increasing volubility of utterance the King went on--