A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the
last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in
the costs. Next!”
Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months
old. Poor young creatures! They had lived these three months
lapped to the lips in worldly comforts. These clothes and trinkets
they were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch
of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree; and in
these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying
to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair,
they went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless,
bedless, breadless; why, the very beggars by the roadsides were
not so poor as they.
Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to
the Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt. Men write
many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but
the fact remains that where every man in a State has a vote, brutal
laws are impossible. Arthur's people were of course poor material
for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy;
and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short
work of that law which the king had just been administering if it
had been submitted to their full and free vote. There is a phrase
which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come
to seem to have sense and meaning--the sense and meaning implied
when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or
the other nation as possibly being “capable of self-government”;
and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation
somewhere, some time or other which _wasn't_ capable of it--wasn't as
able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or
would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all
ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation,
and from the mass of the nation only--not from its privileged
classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade
was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long
ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day
that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.
Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best
governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still
behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the
same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way
down to the lowest.
King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond
my calculations. I had not supposed he would move in the matter
while I was away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining
the merits of officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise
to submit every candidate to a sharp and searching examination;
and privately I meant to put together a list of military qualifications
that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers. That ought
to have been attended to before I left; for the king was so taken
with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must
get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination
as he could invent out of his own head.
I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much
more admirable was the one which I should display to the Examining
Board. I intimated this, gently, to the king, and it fired his
curiosity. When the Board was assembled, I followed him in; and
behind us came the candidates. One of these candidates was a bright
young West Pointer of mine, and with him were a couple of my
West Point professors.
When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh.
The head of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy
King-at-Arms! The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in
his department; and all three were priests, of course; all officials
who had to know how to read and write were priests.
My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head
of the Board opened on him with official solemnity:
“Name?”
“Mal-ease.”
“Son of?”
“Webster.”
“Webster--Webster. H'm--I--my memory faileth to recall the
name. Condition?”
“Weaver.”
“Weaver!--God keep us!”
The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one
clerk fainted, and the others came near it. The chairman pulled
himself together, and said indignantly:
“It is sufficient. Get you hence.”
But I appealed to the king. I begged that my candidate might be
examined. The king was willing, but the Board, who were all
well-born folk, implored the king to spare them the indignity of
examining the weaver's son. I knew they didn't know enough to
examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs and the king
turned the duty over to my professors. I had had a blackboard
prepared, and it was put up now, and the circus began. It was
beautiful to hear the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow
in details of battle and siege, of supply, transportation, mining
and countermining, grand tactics, big strategy and little strategy,
signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all about siege
guns, field guns, gatling guns, rifled guns, smooth bores, musket
practice, revolver practice--and not a solitary word of it all
could these catfish make head or tail of, you understand--and it
was handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the
blackboard that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like
nothing, too--all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and
constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and dinner time,
and bedtime, and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or
under them that you could harry or bullyrag an enemy with and make
him wish he hadn't come--and when the boy made his military salute
and stood aside at last, I was proud enough to hug him, and all
those other people were so dazed they looked partly petrified,
partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed under. I judged
that the cake was ours, and by a large majority.
Education is a great thing. This was the same youth who had come
to West Point so ignorant that when I asked him, “If a general
officer should have a horse shot under him on the field of battle,
what ought he to do?” answered up naively and said:
“Get up and brush himself.”
One of the young nobles was called up now. I thought I would
question him a little myself. I said:
“Can your lordship read?”
His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:
“Takest me for a clerk? I trow I am not of a blood that--”
“Answer the question!”
He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer “No.”
“Can you write?”
He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:
“You will confine yourself to the questions, and make no comments.
You are not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing
of the sort will be permitted. Can you write?”
“No.”
“Do you know the multiplication table?”
“I wit not what ye refer to.”
“How much is 9 times 6?”
“It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency
requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred,
and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren
of the knowledge.”
“If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth 2 pence the bushel,
in exchange for a sheep worth 4 pence and a dog worth a penny,
and C kill the dog before delivery, because bitten by the same,
who mistook him for D, what sum is still due to A from B, and
which party pays for the dog, C or D, and who gets the money?
If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim consequential damages
in the form of additional money to represent the possible profit
which might have inured from the dog, and classifiable as earned
increment, that is to say, usufruct?”
“Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who
moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never
heard the fellow to this question for confusion of the mind and
congestion of the ducts of thought. Wherefore I beseech you let
the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless
names work out their several salvations from their piteous and
wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their
trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should
but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself
to see the desolation wrought.”
“What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?”
“If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate them
whilst that I lay sick about the beginning of the year and thereby
failed to hear his proclamation.”
“What do you know of the science of optics?”
“I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and
sheriffs of counties, and many like small offices and titles of
honor, but him you call the Science of Optics I have not heard
of before; peradventure it is a new dignity.”
“Yes, in this country.”
Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official
position, of any kind under the sun! Why, he had all the earmarks
of a typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to
contribute uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation.
It was unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of that
sort out of his majestic supply of incapacity for the job. But that
didn't prove that he hadn't material in him for the disposition,
it only proved that he wasn't a typewriter copyist yet. After
nagging him a little more, I let the professors loose on him and
they turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and
found him empty, of course. He knew somewhat about the warfare
of the time--bushwhacking around for ogres, and bull-fights in
the tournament ring, and such things--but otherwise he was empty
and useless. Then we took the other young noble in hand, and he
was the first one's twin, for ignorance and incapacity. I delivered
them into the hands of the chairman of the Board with the comfortable
consciousness that their cake was dough. They were examined in
the previous order of precedence.
“Name, so please you?”
“Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash.”
“Grandfather?”
“Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash.”
“Great-grandfather?”
“The same name and title.”
“Great-great-grandfather?”
“We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing before it had
reached so far back.”
“It mattereth not. It is a good four generations, and fulfilleth
the requirements of the rule.”
“Fulfills what rule?” I asked.
“The rule requiring four generations of nobility or else the
candidate is not eligible.”
“A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can
prove four generations of noble descent?”
“Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned
without that qualification.”
“Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing. What good is such a
qualification as that?”
“What good? It is a hardy question, fair sir and Boss, since it doth
go far to impugn the wisdom of even our holy Mother Church herself.”
“As how?”
“For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding
saints. By her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead
four generations.”
“I see, I see--it is the same thing. It is wonderful. In the one
case a man lies dead-alive four generations--mummified in ignorance
and sloth--and that qualifies him to command live people, and take
their weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other case,
a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that
qualifies him for office in the celestial camp. Does the king's
grace approve of this strange law?”
The king said:
“Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange. All places of