Grail really was, and I don’t think any of them
actually expected to find it, or would have known
what to do with it if he had run across it.
You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that
day, as you may say; that was all. Every year
expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year
relief expeditions went out to hunt for them.
There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money.
Why, they actually wanted me to put in!
Well, I should smile.
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION
The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of
course it was a good deal discussed, for such things
interested the boys. The king thought I ought
now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I
might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet Sir
Sagramor when the several years should have rolled
away. I excused myself for the present; I said
it would take me three or four years yet to get things
well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be
ready; all the chances were that at the end of that
time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no
valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I
should then have been in office six or seven years,
and I believed my system and machinery would be so
well developed that I could take a holiday without
its working any harm.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already
accomplished. In various quiet nooks and corners
I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under
way—nuclei of future vast factories, the
iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.
In these were gathered together the brightest young
minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the
country for more, all the time. I was training
a crowd of ignorant folk into experts—experts
in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.
These nurseries of mine went smoothly and privately
along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats,
for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts
without a special permit—for I was afraid
of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools
the first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable
system of graded schools in full blast in those places,
and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations
all in a prosperous and growing condition. Everybody
could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there
was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined
public religious teaching to the churches and the
Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other
educational buildings. I could have given my
own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian
without any trouble, but that would have been to affront
a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts
are as various in the human family as are physical
appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is
only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with
the religious garment whose color and shape and size
most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual
complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual
who wears it; and, besides, I was afraid of a united
Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable,
and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands,
as it is always bound to do, it means death to human
liberty and paralysis to human thought.
