Chapter XIII: Freemen

by Mark Twain

　　Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be contented. Only a little while back,when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven thispeace, this rest, this sweet serenity in this secludedshady nook by this purling stream would have seemed,where I could keep perfectly comfortable all the timeby pouring a dipper of water into my armor now andthen; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not light my pipe -- for, although I hadlong ago started a match factory, I had forgotten tobring matches with me -- and partly because we hadnothing to eat. Here was another illustration of thechildlike improvidence of this age and people. A manin armor always trusted to chance for his food on ajourney, and would have been scandalized at the ideaof hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear. Therewas probably not a knight of all the Round Table combination who would not rather have died than beencaught carrying such a thing as that on his flagstaff.And yet there could not be anything more sensible.It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sandwiches into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act,and had to make an excuse and lay them aside, and adog got them.Night approached, and with it a storm. The darkness came on fast. We must camp, of course. Ifound a good shelter for the demoiselle under a rock,and went off and found another for myself. But I wasobliged to remain in my armor, because I could not getit off by myself and yet could not allow Alisande tohelp, because it would have seemed so like undressingbefore folk. It would not have amounted to that inreality, because I had clothes on underneath; but theprejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of justat a jump, and I knew that when it came to strippingoff that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.With the storm came a change of weather; and thestronger the wind blew, and the wilder the rain lashedaround, the colder and colder it got. Pretty soon,various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and thingsbegan to flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside my armor to get warm; and while some of thembehaved well enough, and snuggled up amongst myclothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless,uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still, but wenton prowling and hunting for they did not know what;especially the ants, which went tickling along inwearisome procession from one end of me to the otherby the hour, and are a kind of creatures which Inever wish to sleep with again. It would be my adviceto persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrasharound, because this excites the interest of all thedifferent sorts of animals and makes every last one ofthem want to turn out and see what is going on, andthis makes things worse than they were before, and ofcourse makes you objurgate harder, too, if you can.Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he woulddie; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other;there is no real choice. Even after I was frozen solidI could still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpsedoes when he is taking electric treatment. I said Iwould never wear armor after this trip.All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yetwas in a living fire, as you may say, on account of thatswarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable questionkept circling and circling through my tired head: Howdo people stand this miserable armor? How have theymanaged to stand it all these generations? How canthey sleep at night for dreading the tortures of nextday?When the morning came at last, I was in a badenough plight: seedy, drowsy, fagged, from want ofsleep; weary from thrashing around, famished fromlong fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of theanimals; and crippled with rheumatism. And howhad it fared with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat,the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise? Why, she wasas fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; andas for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noblein the land had ever had one, and so she was notmissing it. Measured by modern standards, they weremerely modified savages, those people. This noblelady showed no impatience to get to breakfast -- andthat smacks of the savage, too. On their journeysthose Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how tobear them; and also how to freight up against probablefasts before starting, after the style of the Indian andthe anaconda. As like as not, Sandy was loaded for athree-day stretch.We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In half an hour we came upon agroup of ragged poor creatures who had assembled tomend the thing which was regarded as a road. Theywere as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, sooverwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension ofmine that at first they were not able to believe that Iwas in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip andwithdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that shewould as soon think of eating with the other cattle -- aremark which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it insulted oroffended them, for it didn't. And yet they were notslaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrasethey were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree:small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; whichis to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation;they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them wouldhave been to subtract the Nation and leave behind somedregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobilityand gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly withthe arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort ofuse or value in any rationally constructed world. Andyet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at theother end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation,and these innumerable clams had permitted it so longthat they had come at last to accept it as a truth; andnot only that, but to believe it right and as it shouldbe. The priests had told their fathers and themselvesthat this ironical state of things was ordained of God;and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it wouldbe to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially suchpoor transparent ones as this, they had dropped thematter there and become respectfully quiet.The talk of these meek people had a strange enoughsound in a formerly American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lordor their bishop without his permission; they could notprepare their own bread, but must have their cornground and their bread baked at his mill and hisbakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could notsell a piece of their own property without paying him ahandsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a pieceof somebody else's without remembering him in cashfor the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for himgratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice,leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatenedstorm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in theirfields, and then keep their indignation to themselveswhen his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grainaround the trees; they had to smother their anger whenhis hunting parties galloped through their fields layingwaste the result of their patient toil; they were notallowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarmsfrom my lord's dovecote settled on their crops theymust not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awfulwould the penalty be; when the harvest was at lastgathered, then came the procession of robbers to levytheir blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off itsfat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroadupon the remainder; after which, the skinned freemanhad liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in caseit was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes,and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yetother taxes -- upon this free and independent pauper,but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, noneupon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church;if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must situp all night after his day's work and whip the ponds tokeep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter -- butno, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperatewith his tortures, found his life unendurable under suchconditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercyand refuge, the gentle Church condemned him toeternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at thecross-roads with a stake through his back, and his masterthe baron or the bishop confiscated all his property andturned his widow and his orphans out of doors.And here were these freemen assembled in the earlymorning to work on their lord the bishop's road threedays each -- gratis; every head of a family, and everyson of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day orso added for their servants. Why, it was like readingabout France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousandyears of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave ofblood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in theproportion of half a drop of blood for each hogsheadof it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of thatpeople in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrongand shame and misery the like of which was not to bemated but in hell. There were two "Reigns ofTerror," if we would but remember it and consider it;the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other inheartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, theother had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicteddeath upon ten thousand persons, the other upon ahundred millions; but our shudders are all for the"horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swiftdeath by the axe, compared with lifelong death fromhunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What isswift death by lightning compared with death by slowfire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain thecoffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all beenso diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; butall France could hardly contain the coffins filled by thatolder and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter andawful Terror which none of us has been taught to seein its vastness or pity as it deserves.These poor ostensible freemen who were sharingtheir breakfast and their talk with me, were as full ofhumble reverence for their king and Church and nobilityas their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if theysupposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with afree vote in every man's hand, would elect that a singlefamily and its descendants should reign over it forever,whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all otherfamilies -- including the voter's; and would also electthat a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzysummits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of therest of the nation's families -- including his own.They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know;that they had never thought about it before, and ithadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be sosituated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one -- and that it would lastuntil it had an Established Church. Again they wereall unhit -- at first. But presently one man looked upand asked me to state that proposition again; and stateit slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. Idid it; and after a little he had the idea, and hebrought his fist down and said he didn't believe anation where every man had a vote would voluntarilyget down in the mud and dirt in any such way; andthat to steal from a nation its will and preference mustbe a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough ofhis sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of thiscountry, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizenby making a wholesome change in its system ofgovernment."You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one'scountry, not to its institutions or its office-holders.The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, theeternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and carefor, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, theyare its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protectthe body from winter, disease, and death. To beloyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to diefor rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pureanimal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented bymonarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all politicalpower is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted fortheir benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient."Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he seesthat the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out,and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a newsuit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be theonly one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is theduty of the others to vote him down if they do not seethe matter as he does.And now here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restrictedto six persons in each thousand of its population.For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose tochange it, would have made the whole six shudder asone man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I wasbecome a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all themoney and did all the work, and the other six electedthemselves a permanent board of direction and took allthe dividends. It seemed to me that what the ninehundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.The thing that would have best suited the circus sideof my nature would have been to resign the Boss-shipand get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler whotries such a thing without first educating his materialsup to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain toget left. I had never been accustomed to getting left,even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the "deal"which had been for some time working into shapein my mind was of a quite different pattern from theCade-Tyler sort.So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that manthere who sat munching black bread with that abusedand mistaught herd of human sheep, but took himaside and talked matter of another sort to him. AfterI had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink fromhis veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a pieceof bark --Put him in the Man-factory --and gave it to him, and said:"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it intothe hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence,and he will understand.""He is a priest, then," said the man, and some ofthe enthusiasm went out of his face."How -- a priest? Didn't I tell you that no chattelof the Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop canenter my Man-Factory? Didn't I tell you that youcouldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it mightbe, was your own free property?""Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; whereforeit liked me not, and bred in me a cold doubt, to hearof this priest being there.""But he isn't a priest, I tell you."The man looked far from satisfied. He said:"He is not a priest, and yet can read?""He is not a priest and yet can read -- yes, andwrite, too, for that matter. I taught him myself."The man's face cleared. "And it is the first thingthat you yourself will be taught in that Factory --""I? I would give blood out of my heart to knowthat art. Why, I will be your slave, your --""No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave.Take your family and go along. Your lord the bishopwill confiscate your small property, but no matter.Clarence will fix you all right."