"CALL ME JACK!"
It was noticed when the King came down to the first Council of the new
session that his face was flushed and his manner strangely discomposed.
He barely returned the respectful greetings of his ministers, and by
postponement of the customary invitation to be seated, kept them out of
their chairs for quite an appreciable time. Standing awkwardly about
the board they looked like a group of carrion crows awaiting the
symptoms of death before descending to their meal. To none did he accord
any word of personal recognition.
Even when proceedings had commenced it was evident that his attention
constantly wandered, only returning by fits and starts at the call of
some chance phrase on which now and again he would seize, remarking in a
tone of irritation, "And what does this mean, please?" And thereafter he
would require to be instructed at some length, as though he had
forgotten all current or preceding events.
In consequence of this the formal reports of the various departments
became a lengthy business; and the really important matters, to discuss
which the Council had been specially called, were proportionally
delayed.
Presently the word "strikes" caught his ear.
"Ah, yes, what about those strikes?" he inquired.
"They are still going on, your Majesty."
"Yes, _I_ know that! Why are they going on--that's what I want to know?
The strike you are talking about was practically over more than a month
ago; why has it begun again?"
"They have secured fresh funds, sir, and other trades have joined in."
"Is it the other trades that are finding the funds?"
"Not entirely, sir; large contributions are now coming in from abroad."
"From abroad?" interjected the King irritably, "where are they getting
funds from abroad?"
"From England, sir."
"From the Government, do you mean?"
"Of course not from the Government, sir."
"Well, explain yourself, then! Don't call it England if it isn't
England."
"I might almost say that it is England, sir, since a judicial decision
is the immediate cause of it. Labor in that country has just won a very
important action for damages arising out of a Crown prosecution. It has
now been decided that the Crown is responsible for the torts of its
civil and military agents. The unions in consequence are flush with
funds, and a portion of the Court's award, amounting to £50,000, has
been handed over to the strike fund in this country."
"And this subsidy from a foreign and a so-called friendly Power is
having the effect of prolonging our industrial conflicts, and is doing
damage to our trade?"
"Undoubtedly, sir, it has that effect."
"Well, and has nothing been said about it--to the English Government, I
mean?"
"It is not a direct act of the Government, sir."
"I don't need to be told that," said the King. "Neither was it a direct
act of the Government when a party of English undergraduates climbed to
the top of our embassy and hauled down the national flag because
Jingalese had been made a compulsory substitute for Greek at their
universities. But for that the English Government apologized, publicly
and privately, and all round. Do they apologize for this? Do they offer
to compensate us for the loss it is to our trade and the corresponding
gain to theirs? Have they been asked to apologize?"
"Certainly not, sir."
"And pray, why not?"
By this time, around the ministerial board, much open-eyed interrogation
was going on. Where, they seemed to be asking, was this glut of foolish
interrogations going to end? But still the minister under examination
endeavored to answer as though the questions were reasonable.
"There would be no chance, sir, of obtaining any redress."
"Yet this is doing us infinitely more harm?"
"It is merely a development, sir, of that new thing called
'syndicalism.' It is cropping up everywhere now."
"It may be new as it likes," protested the King. "All I say is that as
it stands it is a casus belli. You say it is cropping up; all the more
reason why it should be put down! What else is government for? Take
cattle disease; you put that down, you do not allow that to be imported.
Why should you allow syndicalism to be imported either?"
The Council sought resignation of spirit in sighs and looked to its
Chief in mute appeal.
"How would your Majesty propose to prevent the importation of ideas?"
inquired the Prime Minister dryly, in a tone that tried to be patient.
"Don't tell me," said the King, "that a syndicalist subsidy to Labor of
£50,000 is only an idea. But you are quite right, Mr. Prime Minister; in
the past countries have gone to war largely over the importation of
ideas, as you call them, either religious or social; that is why they
failed. England went to war with France at the end of the eighteenth
century merely because France was importing revolutionary ideas into
England. Was she able to prevent it? No; she only got the disease in a
much more virulent form herself, and has been running tandem to it ever
since. It is no use going to war for sentimental reasons; you must do it
for business reasons, and you must do it in a business-like way."
"Merely as a matter of business, sir," said the Prime Minister, his
hopefulness now on a descending scale, "war with England would cost us
considerably more than the loss of trade occasioned by this subsidy
which you complain of."
"Not a bit of it!" retorted the King, "not if you went the right way to
work. The Chancellor was saying just now that we should have to devise
some fresh taxes. Well, put a tax on Englishmen; quite enough of them
come here to make it worth while. Every summer the place is alive with
them!"
"I am afraid, sir," said the Prime Minister, sighing wearily, "that the
most favored nation clause stands in the way of your Majesty's brilliant
suggestion."
"Not if we do it openly as an act of war," explained the King; "then it
becomes a war tax. That's what I mean when I say conduct your wars on
business lines. Don't tax yourself, tax your enemy! England is the one
country we can fight on our own terms. She can't get at us. We are an
inland power; there isn't a coast within three hundred miles of us; and
Dreadnoughts can't walk on land, you know. They really can't!" he added,
as though there might be some doubt among those who had not yet given
the matter their consideration.
"I assure you, gentlemen, that war on England, if scientifically
conducted, would be a profitable thing. I've been reading a book by a
man named Norman Angell, who says that war doesn't pay. Well, the reason
for that is we don't conduct our wars on the proper lines. Now if we
made war on England----"
"Your Majesty," entreated the Prime Minister, "may we proceed to
business?"
"If we made war on England," persisted the King, "we should not have to
send out a single regiment, or impose any extra taxation on ourselves;
in fact we should save. We should simply raise our railway and hotel
tariffs fifteen or twenty per cent. to all Englishmen, except children
in arms; children up to thirteen half price. There's the whole thing in
a nutshell; no difficulty, no difficulty whatever."
At this point, to the Premier's annoyance, Professor Teller took up the
question with a humorous appreciation of its possibilities.
"But, sir," he inquired, "how should we know that they were Englishmen?
They might disguise themselves as Americans."
"They couldn't!" said the King. "An Englishman trying to talk American
makes as poor an exhibition of himself as an American trying to talk
English; and besides, you don't know the British character! Penalize
them in the way I am suggesting and they would flaunt their nationality
in our faces; they would wear Union-jack waistcoats and carry in their
pockets gramophones which played 'God save the King' when you touched
them. They would make a point of showing us that they didn't care
twopence for our fifteen per cent.; in fact, their Tariff Reformers
would applaud us--they would put it in large headlines in all their
newspapers, and call it an object lesson and would demand a general
election on the strength of it."
"But supposing, sir," inquired the Professor, "that they did not come at
all? We have to remember that we live largely by our tourists; and if we
eliminate the English tourist----"
"Better and better," said the King. "Think how popular we should be with
the rest of Europe! No English? The Germans would simply flock to us;
our hotels would be crammed; we should be turning away money at the
door."
The Prime Minister tapped wearily upon the table; all this was such
utter waste of time; and he began to think that the King was so
intending it, and was bent upon making a royal Council a constitutional
impossibility.
But in some curious magnetic way other members of the Cabinet were now
beginning to be infected. The idea tickled their national vanity; and
though it was all put in a very amateurish way, many of them saw well
enough that for war to be retained as a solution of international
problems something on these lines would have to be done for it.
Syndicalism was merely a showing of the way.
"But, your Majesty," inquired the President of the Board of Ways and
Means, "might not England retaliate by declaring a Tariff war on us?"
"She might," said the King; "but not with the Liberals still in power;
they couldn't reduce themselves to absurdity in that way. Still,
supposing our declaration of war threw the Liberals out, what could the
others do? Our trade in English goods comes to us mainly through France
or Germany; and our own return trade is chiefly limited to our native
crockery, toys, wood-carving, and needlework, supposed survivals of our
peasant industries, which, as a matter of fact, are nearly all of them
manufactured for us in Birmingham, the home of Tariff Reform. In that
matter, by the taxing of articles which are only nominally made in
Jingalo, English trade would suffer more than ours; and there might, in
consequence, come about a real revival of our native crafts (an
advantage which I had not previously thought of)--lacking our usual
supply of the bogus article we should at last become honest in our
professions and truthful in our trademarks. Let the Minister for Home
Industries make a note of it."
"The prospect your Majesty holds out is certainly alluring," replied the
minister thus appealed to; "but if war is to teach us moral lessons,
surely we ought to have moral reasons for engaging in it as well as
business ones."
"Well, if you want them, you've got them!" said the King. "If moral
reasons were to count we ought to have been at war with England any day
for the last fifty years. England has become--if she has not always
been--a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous
experiment on which we have embarked has come from her. By her gross
mismanagement of established institutions--the Church, the Peerage, the
Army, Land, Labor, Capital--the whole system of voluntary service and
voluntary education--she has driven the rest of Europe into
revolutionary changes for which there was no necessity whatever. In
avoiding the woeful example she has set us, of always standing still on
the wrong leg, we have run ourselves off both our own. And now she is
nourishing syndicalism like a bed of weeds, and sowing the seeds of it
into her neighbors' territories. If you are looking for moral excuse
there is no end to it; I preferred, however, to put it to you as a
business proposition."
"I must assure your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "that your
Majesty's present advisers have no intention whatever of making
themselves responsible for a war on England, however advantageous the
circumstances may seem."
He might as well have spoken to the wind; with an increasing volubility
of utterance the King went on--
"If it were decided," said he, "that an actual invasion of England were
advisable, I have three separate plans now forming in my head, all
equally feasible and promising, and all capable of being put into
operation at one and the same time. Each one, in fact, would serve to
divert attention from the others."
It may be noted that at this point Professor Teller suddenly ceased to
be amused; his look of half-quizzical detachment becoming changed to one
of gravity, almost of distress; his Majesty's "pace" had apparently
become too much for him.
"We know, for instance," pursued the King, "that if we succeeded in
effecting a landing the German waiters would rise as one man and join us
as volunteers. Germany would, of course, officially disown them, while
for the purposes of the war we should give them letters of Jingalese
naturalization on their enlistment; these, which they would carry in
their knapsacks, would prevent them from being shot in the event of
their being taken prisoners. Our own army of twenty thousand picked
Jingalese sharp-shooters would go to England disguised as tourists. Each
in his bag would carry a complete military outfit; our new uniforms are
so like those of the English territorials that they would arouse no
suspicion at the Customs House, and even when worn only experts would
know the difference. At a given signal----"
There the Prime Minister, having extracted a look of despairing
encouragement from the Council, got upon his feet.
"I have to ask your Majesty," he said very resolutely, "that we may now
be allowed to proceed to the business for which we have been called
together."
"At a given signal----" went on the King.
"I must protest, your Majesty."
It was quite useless.
"At a given signal--I will give you your signal, Mr. Prime Minister,
when you may throw your bomb; yes, for I have seen you preparing it!--at
a given signal when the King and his Parliament were assembled together
in one place, some of our forces would mingle with the crowd; others
emerging from places of concealment would form into ranks and advance
from various quarters upon Westminster. Then, before any one was aware,
we would cable our declaration of war, rush the House, seize the heads
of the Government, carry them off to the topmost story of the clock
tower, garrison it from basement to roof, and there, with the King and
his whole Cabinet in our hands, stand siege till the rest of the nation
sued for peace."
Once more the Prime Minister endeavored to interpose; he was borne down.
"They could not blow us up," went on the King, "without blowing our
prisoners up also; they could not starve us out, for the King and his
Cabinet would perforce have to share our privations. We should have in
our possession not only the whole personnel of the Government, but that
supreme symbol and safeguard of the popular will which crowns their
constitutional edifice. And, gentlemen, you may think me as mad as you
like--you may arrest me, you may take me to the police-station, you may
rob me of all the evidence of conspiracy I have against you, and you may
call me Jack--jack-of-all-trades, master of none--Jack, plain Jack----"
The Prime Minister and Council sprang to their feet. Consternation was
upon the faces of all.
"But nothing! nothing!" he went on, "no power on earth--except it were a
whole army of steeplejacks----"
At that word the flow of his eloquence ceased; his mouth remained open
but no sound came from it. Suddenly his staring eyes puckered and
closed, wincing as from a blow; and his face flushed to a fiery red,
then paled.
He gave a short cry, threw out an arm feebly; wavered, toppled, crumpled
like a thing without bone, and fell back into his chair.
"My God!" muttered the Prime Minister. "Oh, great Heaven!"
Some one, more nimble of wit than the rest, dashed out of the room to
seek aid. All the others, impressed with a true sense of incompetence,
stood looking at their fallen King. Not one of them knew how to handle
him, whether it were best to lay him down or leave him alone. First
aid--even to their sovereign lord--had formed no part in the education
of these his counselors.
The Prime Minister did the one thing which he knew to be correct--and
which could not possibly do harm; he felt the King's heart. But nobody
for a moment supposed him to be dead; unconscious though he lay, his
heavy breathings could be seen and heard.