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Mark
Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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-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.
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