Three Years Later WHEN I broke the back of knight-errantry that time,I no longer felt obliged to work in secret.So,the very next day I exposed my hidden schools,my mines,and my vast system of clandestine factories and workshops to an astonished world.That is to say,I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.
Well,it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly.The knights were temporarily down,but if I would keep them so I must just simply paralyze them --nothing short of that would answer.You see,Iwas "bluffing"that last time in the field;it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion,if I gave them a chance.So I must not give them time;and I didn't.
I renewed my challenge,engraved it on brass,posted it up where any priest could read it to them,and also kept it standing in the advertising columns of the paper.
I not only renewed it,but added to its proportions.I said,name the day,and I would take fifty assistants and stand up AGAINST THE MASSEDCHIVALRY OF THE WHOLE EARTH AND DESTROY IT.
I was not bluffing this time.I meant what I said;I could do what Ipromised.There wasn't any way to misunderstand the language of that challenge.
Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived that this was a plain case of "put up,or shut up."They were wise and did the latter.In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.
Consider the three years sped.Now look around on England.A happy and prosperous country,and strangely altered.Schools everywhere,and several colleges;a number of pretty good newspapers.Even authorship was taking a start;Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field,with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during thirteen centuries.
If he had left out that old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn't have said anything;but I couldn't stand that one.I suppressed the book and hanged the author.
Slavery was dead and gone;all men were equal before the law;taxation had been equalized.The telegraph,the telephone,the phonograph,the typewriter,the sewing-machine,and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor.We had a steamboat or two on the Thames,we had steam warships,and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine;I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover America.
We were building several lines of railway,and our line from Camelot to London was already finished and in operation.I was shrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passenger service places of high and distinguished honor.My idea was to attract the chivalry and nobility,and make them useful and keep them out of mischief.The plan worked very well,the competition for the places was hot.The conductor of the 4.33express was a duke;there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line below the degree of earl.They were good men,every one,but they had two defects which I couldn't cure,and so had to wink at:they wouldn't lay aside their armor,and they would "knock down"fare --I mean rob the company.
There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful employment.They were going from end to end of the country in all manner of useful missionary capacities;their penchant for wandering,and their experience in it,made them altogether the most effective spreaders of civilization we had.They went clothed in steel and equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe,and if they couldn't persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan,or a melodeon,or a barbed-wire fence,or a prohibition journal,or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for,they removed him and passed on.
I was very happy.Things were working steadily toward a secretly longed-for point.You see,I had two schemes in my head which were the vastest of all my projects.The one was to overthrow the Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins --not as an Established Church,but a go-as-you-please one;and the other project was to get a decree issued by and by,commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced,and given to men and women alike --at any rate to all men,wise or unwise,and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one.Arthur was good for thirty years yet,he being about my own age --that is to say,forty --and Ibelieved that in that time I could easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world --a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed.The result to be a republic.Well,I may as well confess,though I do feel ashamed when I think of it:I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president myself.Yes,there was more or less human nature in me;I found that out.
Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution,but in a modified way.His idea was a republic,without privileged orders,but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate.
He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy.