The head of the governments the Grand Caliph, was
elected for a term of twenty years. I questioned
the wisdom of this. I was answered that he could
do no harm, since the ministry and the parliament governed
the land, and he was liable to impeachment for misconduct.
This great office had twice been ably filled by women,
women as aptly fitted for it as some of the sceptred
queens of history. Members of the cabinet, under
many administrations, had been women.
I found that the pardoning power was lodged in a court
of pardons, consisting of several great judges.
Under the old regime, this important power was vested
in a single official, and he usually took care to have
a general jail delivery in time for the next election.
I inquired about public schools. There were
plenty of them, and of free colleges too. I
inquired about compulsory education. This was
received with a smile, and the remark:
“When a man’s child is able to make himself
powerful and honoured according to the amount of education
he acquires, don’t you suppose that that parent
will apply the compulsion himself? Our free schools
and free colleges require no law to fill them.”
There was a loving pride of country about this person’s
way of speaking which annoyed me. I had long
been unused to the sound of it in my own. The
Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears;
therefore I was glad to leave that country and come
back to my dear native land, where one never hears
that sort of music.
When I say that I never knew my austere father to
be enamoured of but one poem in all the long half
century that he lived, persons who knew him will easily
believe me; when I say that I have never composed but
one poem in all the long third of a century that I
have lived, persons who know me will be sincerely
grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem which
I composed was not the one which my father was enamoured
of, persons who may have known us both will not need
to have this truth shot into them with a mountain
howitzer before they can receive it. My father
and I were always on the most distant terms when I
was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality so
to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality
was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid
enough to say that the breaking and the suffering
were always divided up with strict impartiality between
us—which is to say, my father did the breaking,
and I did the suffering. As a general thing
I was a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy; but
I once jumped off a two-story table; another time
I gave an elephant a “plug” of tobacco
and retired without waiting for an answer; and still
another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep,
and got off a portion of a very wretched original
conundrum in the hearing of my father. Let us
not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to
any one but me.
