Part 10 (1/2)
”So you really think,” inquired the Prime Minister, ”that yours and the Church's voice are one?”
”The blood of her martyrs,” said the Archbishop, ”has stained the very steps of that throne from which under divine Providence I am commissioned to speak with authority. I call on them to witness that never in her hour of need shall the Church surrender her divine mission to preach only pure doctrine and to defend the faith committed to the saints.”
”I thought,” said the Prime Minister, ”that, officially at least, you did not invoke the dead.”
”Sir, we have no need. Their record is our inheritance. It is they who invoke us from an imperishable past.”
”Our discussion, then, seems to be at an end. We have gone back into the middle ages.”
The Prime Minister, having got very much the answer he expected, here rose and began b.u.t.toning his coat. ”Well, Archbishop,” said he, as he thus trimmed himself to give a neat finish to the discussion, ”before we part I will put the question quite frankly: Is it to be peace or war?”
”I am a servant of the Church Militant,” answered his Grace.
And then they compared notes and settled dates as to when war was to be declared. Jingalo was about to exhibit to the world the continuity of her inst.i.tutions, and with her mind thus carried back to ancient times modern controversy was an anachronism.
It was on those historic grounds that they arranged their armistice; but Recording Angels are more truthful than Archbishops or Prime Ministers; and the Recording Angel, having listened to their conversation, was led to set down upon his tables this notable memorandum--that on no account were popular pageantry or trade interests to be disturbed during so golden an opportunity as the Silver Jubilee. While that was going on defense of Church and State must be relegated to obscurity.
III
All this had taken place before the truce actually began (see, in fact, Chapter II). How much, or rather how little the King had heard of it we already know. How little the truce brought benefit to him we shall learn more fully in later chapters. Still for the moment he was not without comfort, for he had got Max to talk to. Every evening that they spent together much talk went on; and the King sat infected and edified while Maxian oratory flowed.
”How is it,” inquired his father, ”that you have been able to think of these things? I see them when you tell me; but how did they ever come to enter your head?”
”For some years,” answered Max, ”I had the advantage of being your youngest son. Until I was twenty, two lives stood between me and the succession, and while Stephen and Rupert were drilling I managed to get educated.”
”Poor Rupert!” murmured his father, ”he would have made a much better King than either of us.”
”I don't think so,” said Max. ”He would merely have kept the monarchy to its old lines--that means sticking in a rut. If the monarchy is to mean anything it will have to move, not merely with the times but ahead of them.”
”How can it move ahead of them?”
”How otherwise can it lead? That is what the heads of the privileged cla.s.ses never seem to understand. Look at the Bishops! See what a spectacle they have made of themselves, all through not leading.”
”Ah, yes,” sighed the King; ”I thought you'd be against the Bishops.”
”Against them?” cried Max, ”of course I'm against them! The Bishops are a set of prehistoric remains: and even if they were all up to date, a combined house of Bishops and Judges with full legislative powers is antediluvian (I'm speaking of the Deluge now in the sense in which Louis XV spoke of it)--it's an eighteenth-century arrangement.
”Yes, I'm against the Bishops, but I'm much more against the Cabinet.
The Cabinet is seeking to control not only the Upper but the Lower Chamber as well, it is fighting the Bishops merely to delude the people; and there are the Laity so stupid, or so lazy, or so corrupt that they won't see it. Every one knows that the Government sells honors for party purposes, and then covers it up by pretending that contributions to the party funds are 'public services.' Everything now is to be had for a price, a Chancellery at so much, a Knighthood at so much more; an Order of the this, that, or the other, in exact proportion to its prestige or its rarity. Last year they had a debate on it in the House, a debate where, between them, the corruptors and the corrupted were in a majority! And they solemnly took a vote on it, and declared that there was no corruption, though everybody knew it to be a fact. The Opposition lay low because they mean to do exactly the same when their time comes.
Oh, and it's not only the House of Laity: I daresay a bishopric has got its price if we only knew!”
The King would have rejected such a suggestion as fantastic only a month ago; but now with the Archimandrite in his mind he began to be suspicious. What price, monetary or political, might not the Free Churchmen be paying for their bishoprics, what secret bargain of which it was no one's duty to inform him? He lashed at his own impotence, for the ignominy of his position increased with his growing consciousness.
Here was the Prime Minister respectful but compulsive, able to threaten, to browbeat, to dictate terms; but he himself had no counter means to extract from that minister on what terms he was consenting to do these things or what price he was paying to get them done. How const.i.tutionally was he to obtain knowledge of anything? And still, piling up the accusation, the voice of Max went on.
”I presume,” said he, ”that quite lately a list of Jubilee honors has been submitted to you for approval. What does your approval mean? Is a single one of them your own selection? Do you know what the majority of them are for?”
The King shook his head. ”Mostly they are political,” said he. ”The Government has the right; I have no call to interfere. Isn't it perhaps better that I should not interfere?”
”It may be arguable, sir, that the uncomfortably high position to which we are born cuts us off from the more strenuously fermenting issues of the political game, and from the malignities and hypocrisies of that party system of which, as a nation, we pretend to be so proud, and are secretly so much ashamed. It may be well that some single authority should stand removed from and above party, if in the hands of that authority there is also left power of sentence and dismissal, power also to withhold unmerited reward. But that power you are no longer expected to exercise,--it lies like a china nest-egg never to be hatched, but only to promote the laying of other eggs.
”Yet while your prerogatives have been thus diminished, the claim that you shall act with judicial impartiality has increased, and has become a fetter. To oppose any course of ministerial action to-day is by implication to ally yourself with the other side. You are in the position of a judge whose directions the jury has authority to ignore, and from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by the will, not of the people, but of that cla.s.s or section which in the evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in the future, that peace-loving, industrial democracy which to-day we are still striving to hold back from its aim. These ruling powers of the past have now concentrated on the Cabinet as their last line of defense; and so at the present day it is the Cabinet which has the largest control not only of patronage (much of it corruptly applied), but of certain penalizing devices by which monetary pressure can be brought upon those who thwart its will. By its practical usurpation of the Crown's right to decree a general election, and by its control of the party funds, from which parliamentary candidates are subsidized and a.s.sisted to the poll, it is able to hold over the heads of its supporters a financial threat to which very few can remain indifferent.