 | CHAPTER X. The monikins |  |
10. CHAPTER X.
A fundamental principle, a fundamental law, and a fundamental
error.
The people of Leaplow are remarkable for the
deliberation of their acts, the moderation of their
views, and the accumulation of their wisdom. As
a matter of course, such a people is never in an
indecent haste. Although I had now been legally
naturalized, and regularly elected to the Great
Council fully twenty-four hours, three entire days
were allowed for the study of the institutions, and
to become acquainted with the genius of a nation
who, according to their own account of the matter,
have no parallel in heaven or earth, or in the
waters under the earth, before I was called upon
to exercise my novel and important functions. I
profited by the delay, and shall seize a favorable
moment to make the reader acquainted with some
of my acquisitions on this interesting topic.
The institutions of Leaplow are divided into two
great moral categories, viz. the legal, and the substitutive.
The former embraces the provisions of
of the great alimentary principle. The first,
accordingly, is limited by the constitution, or the
Great National Allegory, while the last is limited
by nothing but practice; one contains the proposition,
and the other its deductions; this is all hypothesis,
that, all corollary. The two great political
land-marks, the two public opinions, the bob-upon-bobs,
the rotatory action, and the great and little
wheels, are merely inferential; and I shall, therefore,
say nothing about them in my present treatise,
which has a strict relation only to the fundamental
law of the land, or to the Great and Sacred National
Allegory.
It has been already stated that Leaplow was originally
a scion of Leaphigh. The political separation
took place in the last generation, when the Leaplowers
publicly renounced Leaphigh and all it contained,
just as your catechumen is made to renounce
the devil and all his works. This renunciation,
which is also sometimes called the denunciation,
was much more to the liking of Leaplow than to
that of Leaphigh; and a long and sanguinary war
was the consequence. The Leaplowers, after a
smart struggle, however, prevailed in their firm
determination to have no more to do with Leaphigh.
The sequel will show how far they were
right.
Even preceding the struggle, so active was the
sentiment of patriotism and independence, that the
citizens of Leaplow, though ill-provided with the
productions of their own industry, proudly resorted
to the self-denial of refusing to import even a
pin from the mother country, actually preferring
nakedness to submission. They even solemnly voted
that their venerable progenitor, instead of being, as
she clearly ought to have been, a fond, protecting
a rapacious, vindictive and tyrannical step-mother.
This was the opinion, it will be remembered, when
the two communities were legally united, had but
one head, wore clothes, and necessarily pursued a
multitude of their interests in common.
By the lucky termination of the war, all this was
radically changed. Leaplow pointed her thumb
at Leaphigh, and declared her intention henceforth
to manage her own affairs in her own way. In
order to do this the more effectually, and, at the
same time, to throw dirt into the countenance of
her late step-mother, she determined that her own
polity should run so near a parallel, and yet should
be so obviously an improvement on that of Leaphigh,
as to demonstrate the imperfections of the
latter to the most superficial observer. That this
patriotic resolution was faithfully carried out in
practice, I am now about to demonstrate.
In Leaphigh, the old human principle had long
prevailed, that political authority came from God;
though why such a theory should ever have prevailed
anywhere, as Mr. Downright once expressed
it, I cannot see, the devil very evidently having a
greater agency in its exercise than any other influence,
or intelligence, whatever. However, the jus
divinum was the regulator of the Leaphigh social
compact, until the nobility managed to get the better
of the jus, when the divinum was left to shift
for itself. It was at this epocha the present constitution
found its birth. Any one may have observed
that one stick placed on end will fall, as a
matter of course, unless rooted in the earth. Two
sticks fare no better, even with their tops united;
but three sticks form a standard. This simple and
beautiful idea gave rise to the polity of Leaphigh.
Three moral props were erected in the midst of the
the King, to prevent it from slipping; for all the
danger, under such a system, came from that of
the base slipping; at the foot of the second, the nobles;
and at the foot of the third, the people. On
the summit of this tripod was raised the machine
of state. This was found to be a capital invention
in theory, though practice, as practice is very apt
to do, subjected it to some essential modifications.
The King, having his stick all his own way, gave
a great deal of trouble to the two other sets of
stick-holders; and, unwilling to disturb the theory,
for that was deemed to be irrevocably settled and
sacred, the nobility, who, for their own particular
convenience, paid the principal workmen at the
base of the people's stick to stand steady, set about
the means of keeping the King's stick, also, in a
more uniform and serviceable attitude. It was on
this occasion that, discovering the King never could
keep his end of the great social stick in the place
where he had sworn to keep it, they solemnly declared
that he must have forgotten where the constitutional
foot-hole was, and that he had irretrievably
lost his memory,—a decision that was the
remote cause of the recent calamity of Captain
Poke. The King was no sooner constitutionally
deprived of his memory, than it was an easy matter
to strip him of all his other faculties; after which
it was humanely decreed, as indeed it ought to be
in the case of a being so destitute, that he could do
no wrong. By way of following out the idea on a
humane and Christian-like principle, and in order
to make one part of the practice conform to the
other, it was shortly after determined that he should
do nothing; his eldest first-cousin of the masculine
gender being legally proclaimed his substitute. In
the end, the crimson curtain was drawn before the
wriggle the stick in his turn, and derange the balance
of the tripod, the other two sets of stick-holders
next decided that, though his Majesty had an undeniable
constitutional right to say who should be his
eldest first-cousin of the masculine gender, they had
an undoubted constitutional right to say who he
should not be. The result of all this was a compromise;
his Majesty, who, like other people, found the
sweets of authority more palatable than the bitter,
agreeing to get up on top of the tripod, where he
might appear seated on the machine of state, to
receive salutations, and eat and drink in peace,
leaving the others to settle among themselves who
should do the work at the bottom, as well as they
could. In brief, such is the history, and such was
the polity, of Leaphigh, when I had the honor of
visiting that country.
The Leaplowers were resolute to prove that all
this was radically wrong. They determined, in the
first place, that there should be but one great social
beam; and, in order that it should stand perfectly
steady, they made it the duty of every citizen to
prop its base. They liked the idea of a tripod
well enough, but, instead of setting one up in the
Leaphigh fashion, they just reversed its form, and
stuck it on top of their beam, legs uppermost, placing
a separate agent on each leg, to work their machine
of state; taking care, also, to send a new one aloft
periodically. They reasoned thus: If one of the
Leaphigh beams slip—and they will be very apt to
slip in wet weather, with the King, nobles, and people
wriggling and shoving against each other—down
will come the whole machine of state, or, to say
the least, it will get so much awry as never to
work as well as at first; and therefore we will
have none of it. If, on the other hand, one of our
break his own neck. He will, moreover, fall in the
midst of us, and, should he escape with life, we can
either catch him and throw him back again, or we
can send a better hand up in his place, to serve out
the rest of his time. They also maintain that one
beam, supported by all the citizens, is much less
likely to slip than three beams, supported by three
powers of very uncertain, not to say unequal, forces.
Such, in effect, is the substance of the respective
National Allegories of Leaphigh and of Leaplow;
I say Allegories, for both governments seem to rely
on this ingenious form of exhibiting their great distinctive
national sentiments. It would, in fact, be
an improvement, were all constitutions henceforth
to be written in this manner, since they would necessarily
be more explicit, intelligible, and sacred,
than they are by the present attempt at literality.
Having explained the governing principles of
these two important states, I now crave the reader's
attention, for a moment, while I go a little into the
details of the modus operandi, in both cases.
Leaphigh acknowledged a principle, in the outset,
that Leaplow totally disclaimed, viz. that of primogeniture.
Being an only child myself, and having
no occasion for research on this interesting subject,
I never knew the basis of this peculiar right, until
I came to read the great Leaphigh commentator,
Whiterock, on the governing rules of the social
compact. I there found that the first-born, morally
considered, is thought to have better claims to
the honors of the genealogical tree, on the father's
side, than these offspring whose origin is to be
referred to a later period in connubial life. On this
obvious and highly discriminating principle, the
crown, the rights of the nobles, and indeed all
other rights, are transferred from father to son,
Nothing of this is practised in Leaplow. There,
the supposition of legitimacy is as much in favor
of the youngest as of the oldest born, and the practice
is in conformity. As there is no hereditary
chief to poise on one of the legs of the great tripod,
the people at the foot of the beam choose one
from among themselves, periodically, who is called
the Great Sachem. The same people choose another
set, few in number, who occupy a common
seat, on another leg. These they term the Riddles.
Another set, still more numerous and popular in
aspect, if not in fact, fills a large seat on the third
leg. These last, from their being supposed to be
supereminently popular and disinterested, are familiarly
known as the Legion. They are also pleasingly
nicknamed the Bobees, an appellation that
took its rise in the circumstance that most of the
members of their body have submitted to the second
dock, and, indeed, have nearly obliterated every
sign of a cauda. I had, most luckily, been chosen
to sit in the House of Bobees, a station for which I
felt myself to be well qualified, in this great essential
at least; for all the anointing and forcing resorted
to by Noah and myself, during our voyage
out, and our residence in Leaphigh, had not produced
so much as a visible sprout in either.
The Great Sachem, the Riddles, and the Legion,
had conjoint duties to perform, in certain respects,
and separate duties, in others. All three, as they
owed their allegorical elevation to, so were they
dependent on, the people at the foot of the great
social stick, for approbation and reward,—that is
to say, for all rewards other than those which they
have it in their power to bestow on themselves.
There was another authority, or agent of the public,
that is equally perched on the social beam,
named, upon the main prop of the people,—being
also propped by a mechanical disposition of the
tripod itself. These are termed the Supreme Arbitrators,
and their duties are to revise the acts of the
other three agents of the people, and to decide
whether they are or are not in conformity with the
recognized principles of the Sacred Allegory.
I was greatly delighted with my own progress
in the study of the Leaplow institutions. In the
first place, I soon discovered that the principal
thing was to reverse the political knowledge I had
acquired in Leaphigh, as one would turn a tub upside-down,
when he wished to draw from its stores
at a fresh end, and then I was pretty sure of being
within at least the spirit of the Leaplow law. Every
thing seemed simple, for all was dependent on the
common prop, at the base of the great social beam.
Having got a thorough insight myself, into the
governing principles of the system under which I
had been chosen to serve, I went to look up my
colleague, Captain Poke, in order to ascertain how
he understood the great Leaplow Allegory.
I found the mind of the sealer, according to a
beautiful form of speech already introduced in this
narrative, “considerably exercised,” on the several
subjects that so naturally presented themselves to
a man in his situation. In the first place, he was
in a towering passion at the impudence of Bob in
presuming to offer himself as a candidate for the
Great Council; and having offered himself, the rage
of the Captain was in no degree abated by the circumstance
of the young rascal's being at the head
of the poll. He most unreservedly swore “that no
subordinate of his should ever sit in the same legislative
body with himself; that he was a republican
by birth, and knew the usages of republican governments
them; and although he admitted that all sorts of
critturs were sent to Congress in his country, no
man ever knew an instance of a cabin-boy's being
sent there. They might elect just as much as they
pleased; but coming ashore, and playing politician,
were very different things from cleaning his boots,
and making his coffee, and mixing his grog.” The
Captain had just been waited on by a committee
of the Perpendiculars, (half the Leaplow community
is on some committee or other,) by whom he
had been elected, and they had given notice, that
instructions would be sent in, forthwith, to all their
representatives, to perform Gyration No. 3., as
soon after the meeting of the Council as possible.
He was no tumbler, and he had sent for a
master of political saltation, who had just been with
him, practising. According to Noah's own statement,
his success was any thing but flattering. “If
they would give a body room, Sir John,” he said,
in a complaining accent, “I should think nothing
of it—but you are expected to stand shoulder to
shoulder—yard-arm and yard-arm,—and throw
a flap-jack as handily as an old woman would toss
a johnny-cake! It's unreasonable to think of waring
ship without room; but give me room, and I'll engage
to get round on the other tack, and to luff
into the line again, as safely as the oldest cruiser
among 'em, though not quite so quick. They do go
about spitefully, that's sartain!”
Nor were the Great National Allegories without
their difficulties. Noah perfectly understood the
images of the two tripods, though he was disposed
to think that neither was properly secured. A mast
would make but bad weather, he maintained, let it
be ever so well rigged and stay'd, without being
also securely stepped. He saw no use in trusting
the heels of the beams to anybody. Good lashings
go about their private affairs, and no fear the work
would fall. That the King of Leaphigh had no
memory, he could testify from bitter experience;
nor did he believe that he had any conscience; and,
chiefly he desired to know if we, when we got up
into our places on top of the three inverted beams,
among the other Bobees, were to make war on the
Great Sachem and the Riddles, or whether we
were to consider the whole affair as a good thing,
in which the wisest course would be to make fair
weather of it?
To all these remarks and questions, I answered
as well as my own limited experience would allow;
taking care to inform my friend that he had conceived
the whole matter a little too literally, as all
that he had been reading about the great political
beams, the tripods, and the legislative boxes, was
merely an allegory.
“And pray, then, Sir John, what may an allegory
be?”
“In this case, my good sir, it is a constitution.”
“And what is a constitution?”
“Why, it is sometimes, as you perceive, an allegory.”
“And are we not to be mast-headed, then, according
to the book?”
“Figuratively, only.”
“But there are actually such critturs as the Great
Sachem, and the Riddles, and above all, the Bobees!
—We are boney fie-diddle-di-dee elected?”
“Boney fie-diddle-di-dee.”
“And may I take the liberty of asking, what it
is our duty to do?”
“We are to act practically, according to the
literality of the legal, implied, figurative, allegorical
significations of the Great National Compact,
under a legitimate construction.”
“I fear we shall have to work double tides, Sir
John, to do so much in so short a time! Do you
mean that, in honest truth, there is no beam?”
“There is, and there is not.”
“No fore, main, and mizzen-tops, according to
what is here written down?”
“There is not, and there is.”
“Sir John, in the name of God, speak out!—Is
all this about eight dollars a day, no better than a
take in?”
“That, I believe, is strictly literal.”
As Noah now seemed a little mollified, I seized
the opportunity to tell him he must beware how he
attempted to stop Bob from attending the Council.
Members were privileged, going and coming; and
unless he was guarded in his course, he might have
some unpleasant collision with the serjeant-at-arms.
Besides, it was unbecoming the dignity of a legislator
to be wrangling about trisles, and he to whom
was confided the great affairs of a state, ought to
attach the utmost importance to a grave exterior,
which commonly was of more account with his
constituents than any other quality. Any one could
tell whether he was grave or not, but it was by no
means so easy a matter to tell whether he or his
constituents had the greatest cause to appear so.
Noah promised to be discreet, and we parted, not
to meet again until we assembled to be sworn in.
Before continuing the narrative, I will just mention
that we disposed of our commercial investments
that morning. All the Leaphigh opinions brought
good prices; and I had occasion to see how well
the Brigadier understood the market, by the eagerness
with which, in particular, the opinions on the
state of society in Leaplow, were bought up. But,
by one of those unexpected windfalls which raise
up so many of the chosen of the earth to their high
places, the cook did better than any of us. It will
merchandise that he called slush against a neglected
bale of Distinctive Leaplow Opinions, which had
no success at all in Leaphigh. Coming as they did
from abroad, these articles had taken as a novelty
in Bivouac, and he sold them all before night, at
enormous advances; the cry being that something
new and extraordinary had found its way into the
market!
| CHAPTER X. The monikins | |