That Very Mab Part 10

CHAPTER XI. -- HOME AND FOREIGN POLICY COMBINED.

Knowest thou the House where the members elected Consider the measure apart from the brand, Where Voting by Party is quite unaffected, And solely concerned with the good of the land?

Knowest thou the House of Amendments and Clauses, Where Reason may reel but debate never pauses, Where words, the grand note of Humanity, reign (Oh Muller, Max Muller, expound us the gain!), Articulate always, if often insane?

'Tis the Temple of Justice, the home of M.P.'s, Our n.o.ble, our own representatives these, But endless as sands of the desert, and worse, Are the Bills they discuss and the rules they rehea.r.s.e.

'What about the Government?' said Queen Mab to the Owl one day. 'Is there anything that it would do to introduce into Polynesia--that is, if the Germans and the missionaries have gone away again? If they haven't--!' and she sighed.

'I think you had better not try,' returned her counsellor, after considering the point. 'You have got a queen already, and I should think the Polynesians are hardly ripe for a representative Government No doubt, in the course of the struggle for existence, they will get into a good many difficulties, but I rather think that a British const.i.tution on the top of them would not improve matters. If you could get up a Witenagemot now!'

'Oh, the gathering of the Wise Men,' said the fairy. 'I remember that. Has not England got a Witenagemot now, then?' she inquired. Her historical notions, during her long residence in Polynesia, had got fearfully mixed up and hazy.

'They don't call it so,' said the Owl gravely. 'I wonder they don't, it would be very suitable.'

'And what is it for?' asked Mab.

'Chiefly to legislate for the Millennium, I think,' replied the Owl.

'They have been legislating now for a considerable time, but it hasn't come yet. It is late. We expect, however, that it will arrive when the New Democracy is in power. There has been a good deal of annoyance with the Established Church lately for not telegraphing for it sooner, and people say that but for the Church's neglect the Millennium would have been here a very long time ago. Therefore, when the New Democracy comes, it intends, as the Democrat was saying, to be mild but firm, and see if the Millennium can't be got to travel faster. And the first mild but firm thing it will do will be to pull down the Established Church of England and level it with the--with other denominations.'

'What _is_ the Millennium?' said Queen Mab.

'Some think one thing and some another,' returned the Owl. 'Perhaps we had better not discuss it; it is so easy to be profane on the subject before you know where you are. But you can hear Parliament legislating for it any day, and see people living up to it under the gangway.'

'I should like to go and see how they do it,' said Mab, 'just for once.'

'Well, so you can,' said the Owl. 'We can start directly if you like. It is the safest place in London now that the session is on, because of the Home Rulers. The dynamiters couldn't very well blow it up with the Irish members in, and it would look too pointed for them all to be away at the time of its being blown up. Make me invisible and we will go.'

So Queen Mab made them both invisible, and they flew away to the House of Commons. There ensconcing themselves on a high beam, they soon forgot the cobwebs in the interest of the debate. It was a remarkable debate, and, what is also remarkable, I can find no traces of it in the Hansard for that year, and it hardly conforms to the latest rules. Sometimes I am inclined to think that the Owl must have invented it or dreamed it, but he says that every word is mathematically correct, and I know him for a most truthful bird, who never told, or at all events never meant to tell, a lie. The debate was on a Bill introduced by Government for the colonisation of the lunar world by emigration of the able-bodied unemployed, and the House was full. All the Home Rulers were present, a fact which gave the Owl a feeling of pleasant security, and members generally were wide awake and very attentive.

In a brief speech of three hours the Prime Minister advocated the principles of the Bill.

'I am not what is vulgarly called a Jingo' (hear, hear!) he said finally, 'and measures of simple aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, sir, I have never been known to advocate.'

'How about Bechuana?' from Mr. Jacob Bright.

'If the rules of courtesy demanded a reply to that interruption,' said the Prime Minister, 'I would answer,' and he did so for an hour by Shrewsbury clock. He then proceeded:

'But there is a wide difference between annexation necessary to maintain the integrity of our glorious realm, as in the case of Bechuana, and the annexations so often observed in the policy of Continental Powers, springing from a mere greed of empire. We may deplore, indeed, that a preceding Administration has involved us in responsibilities almost beyond the power of statesmen to grapple with successfully; but that is the habit of preceding Administrations, and now that such measures are beyond recall we shall not s.h.i.+rk their consequences. The recent annexation of Mercury by Russia, and the presence in Jupiter of a German emissary, whose ulterior object, though the Press of that country states him to have gone there solely for the benefit of his health, cannot be viewed with too much suspicion, make it inc.u.mbent on all parties to unite in speedy measures for the security of our home and colonial interests.' (Ministerial cheers.) 'I am at a loss to conceive,' said a member of the Opposition, rising--and here the irregularity comes in, for which we can only refer readers to the Owl--'what is the drift of the remarks we have just listened to. I am no enemy to annexation, as honourable members know well. We have been annexing ever since we had a rood of land to make annexations to, and it would be a pity to begin to stop now. But as for occupying a place like the Moon, without water, without air, without inhabitants--that, sir, appears to me to be adding folly to madness. Is the Government not content with the proofs of utter imbecility'--(order)--'I will say, of excruciating feebleness, it has given to the public, that it must squander the resources of the nation for the sake of a wild-goose chase like this? As for the German envoy, he has gone to Jupiter for the benefit of a settled climate, and to drink the waters, not to annex a planet which, with the present indifferent means of communication, could be of no service to his country. This is the simple explanation, which anybody but an old owl like the Prime Minister--'

'Order, order!' shouted several voices, and the Speaker, rising gravely, called upon the honourable member to withdraw the epithet of 'old owl'

as unparliamentary.

'I withdraw it,' said the member readily. 'I should have said, the gentleman so highly distinguished for youth and sanity, who has plunged us into oceans of disaster at home and abroad, and, not content with making the world we live in too hot to hold us, intends to make all the planets related to us in the Solar System too hot to hold us, as well.

He has determined wantonly to attack a sphere with which we have always maintained the most cordial relations, to invade its territories, ravage its villages, and introduce the atrocious benefits of Maxim guns and Gladstone claret to the Selenites.'

'The honourable member observed a moment ago,' said the Prime Minister ironically, 'that there were no Selenites.'

'So I did,' returned the Opposition member unabashed. 'I am not ashamed of that. If the Moon has no inhabitants, you can have no commercial relations with the Moon; if it has, you can only demoralise an unsophisticated population. But I refuse to be held responsible for the opinions I expressed two minutes ago. I am a true Briton, and I absolutely decline to limit myself to a single contradiction, or to a dozen, in the course of a quarter of an hour's harangue.'

'We can quite believe _that_!' said the Home Secretary blandly. 'But till my honourable friend undertakes the management of affairs--before which may heaven remove me! ("Hear, hear!" from the honourable friend)--it is the business of competent statesmen to preserve relations friendly yet firm with foreign Powers terrestrial and celestial, and we shall do it, sir, if we have to annex the Pleiades (cheers).

To ill.u.s.trate by a single case the urgency of an action which the honourable member, in his own choice and happy phraseology, stigmatised as a wild-goose chase. If a Power which I will not specify is allowed to occupy that interesting orb which it is our hope to link closely with our own destinies in national union--_what of the tides_? (Cheers.) Sir, it has long been our proud boast that Britannia rules the waves.

How much longer, I ask you, would she continue to rule them, if once the sway with which the studies of our childhood have made us all familiar pa.s.sed into the hands of alien and perhaps hostile authorities?

(Prolonged cheers.) Can we doubt that unfriendly arbitration would eventually turn away all the tides from our hitherto favoured island, and would divert the current of the Gulf Stream to Powers with whom our relations are strained, while punctually supplying us with icebergs and a temperature below zero from the Arctic Zone? Once hemmed in (or surrounded) by icebergs, what becomes of your carrying trade? Can we doubt that the trade-winds, too, would be mere playthings in the hands of a lunar colonial Government, inspired in every action by the malice of an unfriendly terrestrial Admiralty, and that, in short, by a terrible reversal of the national motto for which we feel so just a reverence, Britannia would cease to rule the waves, while the waves would rule Britannia?' (Loud and prolonged Ministerial cheers, during which another member of the Opposition rose and inquired the precise policy of Her Majesty's Government towards the Selenites.)

'I am instructed,' said a Cabinet Minister, 'to inform the honourable member that the Selenites have no existence. The step contemplated is therefore a mere peaceful annexation, and war and bloodshed, such as were pathetically alluded to by the honourable member for Putney, are out of the question. I may here bring clearly before the minds of the House the fact that, as the Moon is dest.i.tute of any atmosphere, scientific men have unanimously declared the impossibility of animal life upon it.'

'I should like to know,' said a member, rising below the gangway, 'whether the Government has given its attention to one point, namely, that as where there is no atmosphere there can be no inhabitants, where there can be no inhabitants there can be no representatives of rival terrestrial Powers. Unless the forces of a certain Power are capable of living without air, I fail to see that we have anything to apprehend from their occupation of the Moon. Russians, for instance, are not personally dear to me; and I should say that the more of them introduce civilisation to that extinct and uninhabitable sphere the better; but I utterly decline to go there myself, or to vote for sending even our convicts there, much less our able-bodied unemployed. I should like this little difficulty explained, for I confess that, to an unstatesmanlike mind, this debate seems to be verging on nonsense.' 'I had not thought it necessary, at this early stage of the debate,' observed the Prime Minister plaintively, 'to remind the House that no such difficulty as that present to the mind of the honourable member really exists. Has my honourable friend below the gangway never heard of a mental or a moral atmosphere? Is it not one which inevitably surrounds us, in the incandescent Soudan or in the chill abode of departed Selenites? What he regards as an insuperable drawback only furnishes me with another reason for urging the Bill upon you. Would it not be a disgrace to the British flag, ever the friend of civilisation and of virtue, to allow a perverted moral atmosphere to be introduced into an orb which has done so much for us in the way of tidal action, of artistic enjoyment, and, I will say, of amatory sentiment--(cheers)--as our satellite? Now what kind of moral atmosphere, I would ask, surrounds the average Russian? Of a mental atmosphere I will not speak--suffice it to say that that also is immeasurably inferior; but is it fitting for a nation like ours, in the van of progress, to suffer a moral atmosphere degraded, pernicious, and suffocating to circulate in regions to which we could furnish one so infinitely more salubrious?' (Prolonged Ministerial cheers.)

CHAPTER XII. -- THE DELUGE.

'The drivelling of politicians!'

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

It is said that the unexpected always happens, and therefore one may deplore without surprise the fact that schemes set on foot by a charitable government to relieve the necessities of their starving fellow-countrymen should frequently have a diametrically opposite effect. Into the Ministerial cheers that followed the Premier's last statement broke a sound outside the House, a sound as of much wailing, the howling of innumerable newsboys, the cries of 'Woe, woe!' the dirge of an empire _qui s'en va_! With those now familiar noises was mingled, but at a greater distance, a strain of martial music.

'What is this?' said the Prime Minister through the increasing tumult, with a vague idea of legions of the able-bodied unemployed coming in person to state their views on the debate. 'A riot?'

'No,' shouted the member below the gangway, promptly divining, by a prophetic instinct, the real nature of the case. 'It is a Revolution.'

'Heavens!' said the leader of the Opposition helplessly. 'I hope not. I had no idea!'

It was too true. The Army was advancing to the House--the broken-down, ragged, wasted remnant of an Army of Heroes. Sent forth, too late, to 'smash' Prester John, and relieve the Equator, they had all but overcome the Desert, and had only been defeated by s.p.a.ce. Too many of them lay like the vanished legions of Cambyses, swathed by the sand and lulled by the music of the night wind. The remnant had returned of their own motion. It was an impressive spectacle, and the British public, finding no more appropriate action, cheered vociferously, while the newsboys, hundreds of them, continued to howl one against another. For the newspapers had got wind of Something, and it only remained for them to find out what the Something was. At present they had confused the facts--an accident which will happen sometimes with the best-regulated newspapers. But all of them had made shots at the truth, more or less un-veracious. 'The Banner' a.s.serted that Sir Charles Dilke and the Democrat, arrayed in costumes of the beginning of the seventeenth century for effect, were parading the cellars under the House of Lords, after the manner of Guy Fawkes, laying trains of gunpowder and singing the well-known lines about the fifth of November. The 'Daily Pulpit,'

on the other hand, declared that Lord Randolph Church-hill had set the Thames on fire with native genius and a lighted fusee, which, on the face of it, seemed so extremely probable, that all of the British public that was not cheering the Army's arrival rushed to the bridges to investigate the river. Delegates from the 'Holywell Street Gazette,' in the meantime, were madly interviewing everything and everybody with such celerity that the British public probably arrived at the truth of matters somewhere about that journal's fifth edition. Up to this time, unfortunately, the 'Gazette' had only been able to contradict flatly all the statements of all its contemporaries in language, to say the least of it, most emphatic. But at a national crisis one is nothing if not emphatic. And this was a national crisis. And while the crowd was rus.h.i.+ng and swaying hither and thither, and the light-fingered brigade was taking advantage of the crowd's absent-mindedness to borrow its watches and pocket-handkerchiefs, the General, just returned from the Desert, with the demeanour of a second Cromwell, was marching on the House of Commons. In the House itself reigned confusion much worse confounded. There was no time for lengthy recrimination, for in another moment the General, alone, and with a mien of indignant resolution that struck a chill to the hearts of the most irrepressible members, was striding boldly up to the table. The Speaker looked at the Serjeant-at-Arms, and the Serjeant-at-Arms looked at the Speaker, but neither of them said a word. This was worse than Mr. Bradlaugh at his worst.

'Behold in this handful of broken and wasted men, returned, not by _your_ order, but by _mine_, to their native sh.o.r.e,' exclaimed the General in a voice of stern thunder that reverberated through the building, 'the result of your imbecile, idiotic, ignominious, incomprehensible policy and of your absurd "Intelligence" and "Righteousness!" Call yourselves a Parliament? I tell you, your Const.i.tution is rotten to the core. Do you think we are to shed our blood for you, to perish of famine, sword and pestilence, while you sit here, talking the most delirious nonsense that ever was talked since the Confusion of Tongues? You never have anything fresh to say; but there you are, and nothing stops you. If it was the Day of Judgment you would go on moving resolutions; and you have the insolence to maunder over your gallant band of heroes, sacrificed to a whim of party rancour or a struggle for place. We put you here to maintain law and order, to give justice to your fellow-countrymen, and you sit listening to your own melodious voices raving of the welfare of the nation, of Political Economy, Budgets, and Ballots; but so much as the meaning of true justice the bulk of you never guess. _You_, you turn Parliament into a club, and your ambition is satisfied by invitations to dinner. But we have borne enough, and marched enough; now you must march. We have trudged at your bidding thousands of weary miles, for an end you made impossible by your word-splitting cowardice. _Your_ turn has come. The troops are in readiness; we are drilling the unemployed in event of civil war, and you had better look out. "Obey me,"' added the General, insensibly sliding into a popular quotation, '"and my nature's ile: disobey me, and it's still ile, but it's ile of vitriol."'

For the most part honourable members sat stunned and silent; but from the more rebellious came a few cries of 'Order!' 'Turn him out!' and the Speaker slowly rose. 'I would remind the gallant General of the Mutiny Act,' he said.

'An obsolete restriction of free contract,' said the General. He stamped his foot, and in a second a file of soldiers had appeared.

'Take away that bauble!' exclaimed the General to his aide-decamp in a severe and terrible tone, as he pointed to the mace. But as he gazed upon the venerable emblem his frown melted, and his eyes grew dim.

For one instant the victorious warrior, the inexorable avenger of his country's wrongs, was the dreamy wors.h.i.+pper of Blue China, the aesthetic adorer of marquetry, and Chippendale.

'Take away that bauble,' he repeated in a low voice of ineffable sweetness, 'and deposit it in the upper compartment of my bureau. You know the spot. The bauble has a Chippendale feeling about it.'

Then his fort.i.tude returned; he was once more the dauntless General, the saviour of society.

'A pa.s.sing weakness,' he said, smiling sadly. '"Richard's himself again!"'

Into the lull that followed his words fell the familiar accents of the future Dictator, the Member for Woodstock, as he said in a cool aside to Mr. Goschen: