by Mark Twain
CHAPTER X
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION
The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it wasa 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 meetSir Sagramor when the several years should have rolled away.I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me threeor 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 ofthat time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuabletime would be lost by the postponement; I should then have beenin office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinerywould be so well developed that I could take a holiday withoutits 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 allsorts of industries under way--nuclei of future vast factories,the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization. In thesewere 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--expertsin every sort of handiwork and scientific calling. These nurseriesof mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in theirobscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into theirprecincts without a special permit--for I was afraid of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools thefirst thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of gradedschools in full blast in those places, and also a complete varietyof Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growingcondition. Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wantedto; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined publicreligious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permittingnothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could havegiven my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterianwithout any trouble, but that would have been to affront a lawof human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various inthe human family as are physical appetites, complexions, andfeatures, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he isequipped with the religious garment whose color and shape andsize 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 intoselfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death tohuman 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--holesgrubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide byhand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the miningon a scientific basis as early as I could.
Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor'schallenge struck me.
Four years rolled by--and then! Well, you would never imagineit in the world. Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is insafe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfectgovernment. An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfectearthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, thedespot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his leaseof life perpetual. But as a perishable perfect man must die, andleave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, anearthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it isthe worst form that is possible.
My works showed what a despot could do with the resources ofa kingdom at his command. Unsuspected by this dark land, I hadthe civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its verynose! It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was,a gigantic and unassailable fact--and to be heard from, yet, ifI lived and had luck. There it was, as sure a fact and as substantiala fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokelesssummit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in itsbowels. My schools and churches were children four years before;they were grown-up now; my shops of that day were vast factoriesnow; 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 stoodwith my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on andflood the midnight world with light at any moment. But I was notgoing to do the thing in that sudden way. It was not my policy.The people could not have stood it; and, moreover, I should havehad the Established Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute.
No, I had been going cautiously all the while. I had had confidentialagents trickling through the country some time, whose office wasto undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnawa little at this and that and the other superstition, and so preparethe way gradually for a better order of things. I was turning onmy 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 moreand 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 mynaval academy which I had established at a remote seaport. Bothwere prospering to my satisfaction.
Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my righthand. He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn'tanything he couldn't turn his hand to. Of late I had been traininghim for journalism, for the time seemed about right for a startin the newspaper line; nothing big, but just a small weekly forexperimental circulation in my civilization-nurseries. He tookto it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him, sure.Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth centuryand 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 regioneither by matter or flavor.
We had another large departure on hand, too. This was a telegraphand a telephone; our first venture in this line. These wires werefor private service only, as yet, and must be kept private untila riper day should come. We had a gang of men on the road, workingmainly by night. They were stringing ground wires; we were afraidto put up poles, for they would attract too much inquiry. Groundwires were good enough, in both instances, for my wires wereprotected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect.My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, andestablishing connection with any considerable towns whose lightsbetrayed their presence, and leaving experts in charge. Nobodycould tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobodyever went intentionally to any place, but only struck it byaccident in his wanderings, and then generally left it withoutthinking to inquire what its name was. At one time and anotherwe had sent out topographical expeditions to survey and map thekingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble.So we had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poorwisdom to antagonize the Church.
As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had beenwhen I arrived in it, to all intents and purposes. I had madechanges, but they were necessarily slight, and they were notnoticeable. Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation,outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues. I hadsystematized those, and put the service on an effective andrighteous basis. As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled,and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed thanbefore, that all the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praisesof 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 couldhave annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and swimmingright along. The king had reminded me several times, of late, thatthe postponement I had asked for, four years before, had aboutrun out now. It was a hint that I ought to be starting out to seekadventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthyof the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor,
who was stillout grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions,and might be found any year, now. So you see I was expectingthis interruption; it did not take me by surprise.