How strange and remote and romantic and Oriental and Arabian-Nighty it
all seems--and is. It brings back the old forgotten tales, and we hear
the King say to his Treasurer:
“Bring me 30,000 gold tomauns.”
“Allah preserve us, Sire! the treasury is empty.”
“Do you hear? Bring the money--in ten days. Else, send me your head in a
basket.”
“I hear and obey.”
The Treasurer summons the head men of a hundred villages, and says to
one:
“Bring me a hundred gold tomauns.” To another, “Bring me five hundred.”
To another, “Bring a thousand. In ten days. Your head is the forfeit.”
“Your slaves kiss your feet! Ah, high and mighty lord, be merciful to
our hard-pressed villagers; they are poor, they are naked, they starve;
oh, these impossible sums! even the half----”
“Go! Grind it out of them, crush it out of them, turn the blood of the
fathers, the tears of the mothers, the milk of the babes to money--or
take the consequences. Have you heard?”
“His will be done, Who is the Fount of love and mercy and compassion,
Who layeth this heavy burden upon us by the hand of His anointed
servants--blessed be His holy Name! The father shall bleed, the mother
shall faint for hunger, the babe shall perish at the dry breast. The
chosen of God have commanded: it shall be as they say.”
I am not meaning to object to the substitution of pagan customs for
Christian, here and there and now and then, when the Christian ones are
inconvenient. No; I like it and admire it. I do it myself. And I admire
the alertness of the Board in watching out for chances to trade Board
morals for Chinese morals, and get the best of the swap; for I cannot
endure those people, they are yellow, and I have never considered yellow
becoming. I have always been like the Board--perfectly well-meaning, but
destitute of the Moral Sense. Now, one of the main reasons why it is so
hard to make the Board understand that there is no moral difference
between a big filch and a little filch, but only a legal one, is that
vacancy in its make-up. Morally, there are no degrees in stealing. The
Commandment merely says, “Thou shalt not _steal_,” and stops there. It
doesn’t recognize any difference between stealing a third and stealing
thirteenfold. If I could think of a way to put it before the Board in
such a plain and--