Kabanata Kabanata 10 · BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

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-candle-power 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 the thing up, for the present; it would be poor

wisdom to antagonize the Church.

As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been

when I arrived in it, to all intents and purposes. I had made

changes, but they were necessarily slight, and they were not

noticeable. Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation,

outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues. I had

systematized those, and put the service on an effective and

righteous basis. As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled,

and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than

before, that all the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praises

of my administration were hearty and general.

Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it,

it could not have happened at a better time. Earlier it could

have annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and swimming

right along. The king had reminded me several times, of late, that

the postponement I had asked for, four years before, had about

run out now. It was a hint that I ought to be starting out to seek

adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthy

of the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still

out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions,

and might be found any year, now. So you see I was expecting

this interruption; it did not take me by surprise.