“This is grand--this is splendid; but will not England resist?”
“Let her. This rock is a Gibraltar.”
“True. But about the empire? Do we need an empire and an emperor?”
“What you need, my friends, is unification. Look at Germany; look at
Italy. They are unified. Unification is the thing. It makes living dear.
That constitutes progress. We must have a standing army and a navy.
Taxes follow, as a matter of course. All these things summed up make
grandeur. With unification and grandeur, what more can you want? Very
well--only the empire can confer these boons.”
So on the 8th day of December Pitcairn's Island was proclaimed a free
and independent nation; and on the same day the solemn coronation of
Butterworth I, Emperor of Pitcairn's Island, took place, amid great
rejoicings and festivities. The entire nation, with the exception of
fourteen persons, mainly little children, marched past the throne in
single file, with banners and music, the procession being upward of
ninety feet long; and some said it was as much as three-quarters of a
minute passing a given point. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the
history of the island before. Public enthusiasm was measureless.
Now straightway imperial reforms began. Orders of nobility were
instituted. A minister of the navy was appointed, and the whale-boat put
in commission. A minister of war was created, and ordered to proceed at
once with the formation of a standing army. A first lord of the treasury
was named, and commanded to get up a taxation scheme, and also open
negotiations for treaties, offensive, defensive, and commercial, with
foreign powers. Some generals and admirals were appointed; also
some chamberlains, some equerries in waiting, and some lords of the
bedchamber.
At this point all the material was used up. The Grand Duke of Galilee,
minister of war, complained that all the sixteen grown men in the empire
had been given great offices, and consequently would not consent to
serve in the ranks; wherefore his standing army was at a stand-still. The
Marquis of Ararat, minister of the navy, made a similar complaint. He
said he was willing to steer the whale-boat himself, but he must have
somebody to man her.
The emperor did the best he could in the circumstances: he took all the
boys above the age of ten years away from their mothers, and pressed
them into the army, thus constructing a corps of seventeen privates,
officered by one lieutenant-general and two major-generals. This pleased
the minister of war, but procured the enmity of all the mothers in the
land; for they said their precious ones must now find bloody graves in
the fields of war, and he would be answerable for it. Some of the more
heartbroken and unappeasable among them lay constantly wait for the
emperor and threw yams at him, unmindful of the body-guard.
On account of the extreme scarcity of material, it was found necessary
to require the Duke of Bethany postmaster-general, to pull stroke-oar
in the navy and thus sit in the rear of a noble of lower degree namely,
Viscount Canaan, lord-justice of the common pleas. This turned the Duke
of Bethany into tolerably open malcontent and a secret conspirator--a
thing which the emperor foresaw, but could not help.
Things went from bad to worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the
peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for
reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry
Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused
trouble in a powerful quarter--the church. The new empress secured the
support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in
the nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this
made deadly enemies of the remaining twelve. The families of the maids
of honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep
house. The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen
as servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and
other great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform
other menial and equally distasteful services. This made bad blood in
that department.
Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support
of the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were
intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary. The
emperor's reply--“Look--Look at Germany; look at Italy. Are you better
than they? and haven't you unification?”---did not satisfy them. They
said, “People can't eat unification, and we are starving. Agriculture
has ceased. Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,
everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with
nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields--”
“Look at Germany; look at Italy. It is the same there. Such is
unification, and there's no other way to get it--no other way to keep it
after you've got it,” said the poor emperor always.
But the grumblers only replied, “We can't stand the taxes--we can't
stand them.”
Now right on top of this the cabinet reported a national debt amounting
to upward of forty-five dollars--half a dollar to every individual in
the nation. And they proposed to fund something. They had heard that
this was always done in such emergencies. They proposed duties on
exports; also on imports. And they wanted to issue bonds; also paper
money, redeemable in yams and cabbages in fifty years. They said the pay
of the army and of the navy and of the whole governmental machine was
far in arrears, and unless something was done, and done immediately,
national bankruptcy must ensue, and possibly insurrection and
revolution. The emperor at once resolved upon a high-handed measure, and
one of a nature never before heard of in Pitcairn's Island. He went in
state to the church on Sunday morning, with the army at his back, and
commanded the minister of the treasury to take up a collection.
That was the feather that broke the camel's back. First one citizen, and
then another, rose and refused to submit to this unheard-of outrage--and
each refusal was followed by the immediate confiscation of the
malcontent's property. This vigor soon stopped the refusals, and the
collection proceeded amid a sullen and ominous silence. As the emperor
withdrew with the troops, he said, “I will teach you who is master
here.” Several persons shouted, “Down with unification!” They were at
once arrested and torn from the arms of their weeping friends by the
soldiery.
But in the mean time, as any prophet might have foreseen, a Social
Democrat had been developed. As the emperor stepped into the gilded
imperial wheelbarrow at the church door, the social democrat stabbed at
him fifteen or sixteen times with a harpoon, but fortunately with such a
peculiarly social democratic unprecision of aim as to do no damage.
That very night the convulsion came. The nation rose as one man--though
forty-nine of the revolutionists were of the other sex. The infantry
threw down their pitchforks; the artillery cast aside their cocoa-nuts;
the navy revolted; the emperor was seized, and bound hand and foot in
his palace. He was very much depressed. He said:--
“I freed you from a grinding tyranny; I lifted you up out of your
degradation, and made you a nation among nations; I gave you a strong,
compact, centralized government; and, more than all, I gave you the
blessing of blessings--unification. I have done all this, and my reward
is hatred, insult, and these bonds. Take me; do with me as you will.
I here resign my crown and all my dignities, and gladly do I release
myself from their too heavy burden. For your sake I took them up; for
your sake I lay them down. The imperial jewel is no more; now bruise and
defile as ye will the useless setting.”
By a unanimous voice the people condemned the ex-emperor and the social
democrat to perpetual banishment from church services, or to perpetual
labor as galley-slaves in the whale-boat--whichever they might prefer.
The next day the nation assembled again, and rehoisted the British flag,
reinstated the British tyranny, reduced the nobility to the condition of
commoners again, and then straightway turned their diligent attention
to the weeding of the ruined and neglected yam patches, and the
rehabilitation of the old useful industries and the old healing and
solacing pieties. The ex-emperor restored the lost trespass law, and
explained that he had stolen it--not to injure any one, but to further
his political projects. Therefore the nation gave the late chief
magistrate his office again, and also his alienated Property.
Upon reflection, the ex-emperor and the social democrat chose perpetual
banishment from religious services in preference to perpetual labor as
galley-slaves “with perpetual religious services,” as they phrased
it; wherefore the people believed that the poor fellows' troubles had
unseated their reason, and so they judged it best to confine them for
the present. Which they did.
Such is the history of Pitcairn's “doubtful acquisition.”