What led to the overthrow of this strange company was a very natural extension of their business. They opened a branch for the destruction of fame, or, as they called it, for negative reputation. They found that they had continual demands made for this natural complement to their other function. At last they yielded to the pressure, and tried to use their old staff in the new service; but it was found that it destroyed their eulogistic talents; they rapidly developed into such accomplished slanderers and backbiters and defamers that they found it difficult to say a word in favour of anyone. In order to save the best of their old employees, the company had to hire a new set for the new business. They had intended to keep it an absolutely secret service. But, as the story of the new employment leaked out, their offices were daily mobbed by applicants for posts. They were of all sorts and sizes; but those who brought the most glowing testimonials to their capacity as traducers were tall and lank, long-nosed and large-mouthed, red-haired and small-skulled—as fine a crowd of Judases, it was said, as could have been picked out of living creatures. It was impossible to hire them all; half the nation would have been in the pay of the company. But those whom they rejected set themselves so vigorously to traducing the company that a yell of execration rose against it.
Such an outcry might have been ignored, but that their other department, which had been in full working order for several generations, had excited the hostility of many of the most respectable families. For the passion for posthumous fame had eaten into their fortunes. Men of wealth had taken the money that they should have left to their relatives and posterity, and willed it to the company in the purchase of as much immortality as it would buy. Some of the noblest houses were impoverished by this itch for keeping a name alive. And still more would have been reduced to poverty, but that they had a large pecuniary interest in the business, or had most of their members salaried in its employ.
It had come to be a great scandal and had roused the attention of the state; added to the outcry of the disappointed Judases, this supplied the opportunity for the reformers. And, on looking into the matter, they found that the company was growing too powerful for any government to stand up against it. It was absorbing most of the wealth and all the real influence over the Aleofanians. It had such vast and disciplined forces as no nation could bring into the field. The longing for reputation or fame had made one half the people its clients, and the necessities of fortune and the love of slander had made the other half into its servants. The king’s ministers had to move with great caution, for they would have to meet all the talking, puffing, amusing, slandering power of the race organised into a subtle impalpable phalanx; the discipline was more imperturbable than that of the strongest army; there was no breaking the ranks whilst the influence penetrated everywhere like an atmosphere. In fact for generations they had not dared to move against their own creation. And even now that there was a strong set of the current of public opinion against it, its abolition could be brought about only by a secret and sudden blow. They met in dark conclave and took their measures without any item of the secret oozing out. The company was caught unawares and surrendered. Its business was appropriated and placed under the administration of a new department. A royal proclamation, accepting all its servants as employees of the new bureau, and all its obligations as state obligations, prevented panic; and the transference was made without the slightest public commotion.
The revolutionary measure left the directors of the company wealthy but powerless. And it gave to the government a prestige no ministry had ever had. The Bureau of Fame became a tower of strength that grew at last impregnable; and the direction of it was the main object of a statesman’s ambition. It gave him the subtlest of influences over the desires of men. Before him even the greatest and proudest cringed; for he could make or annihilate that upon which their existence hung. They lived in the breath of others; to have all speak ill of them or, still worse, speak nothing of them was more bitter than death. What were wealth, huge estates, great fortune, unlimited power over luxuries, compared with the ballooning of their name whilst they lived and the surety that it would still be raised aloft when they were dead? Their present heaven consisted in the favouring winds of fame; the salvation of their souls lay in immortal reputation. One of their philosophers indeed had with much applause defined the soul as the breath not of a man’s own body, but of his neighbours and his public. To be no more talked of was real death. The disanimation of the body was not the true end of life; many died long before that; whilst some few outlived the dissolution of the dust.
CHAPTER X
THE CHURCH AND JOURNALISM
THE Bureau of Fame had come to be the real shrine of religion. For it had the power of heaven and hell beyond as well as on this side of the grave. And one of the most significant changes in the government of Aleofane in recent times had been the amalgamation of the ministry of public worship with the department of fame. The church had of course from the earliest times been a state institution; and in spite of new-fangled philosophers was likely to continue so. For how could so subtle a force in human nature as religion be allowed to straggle lawlessly throughout a nation? Above all things it needed the most skilful piloting. A church apart from the state, an independent power, meant the spirit against the body, a divorce unnatural, if not monstrous. This was the philosophy of the position. And so convinced of it were the rulers that they allowed less independence of action in the ecclesiastical than in any other department. The head of the church was a minister responsible to the government, and they thought it illogical and feeble to let such an organisation legislate for itself. It was according to nature, it was the true primitive law, that the state and the church should be completely one. The idea of their separation was the result of degeneracy from the golden age. And what anarchy would ensue from an attempt to realise such a scheme or rather no scheme!
To speak of the separation of church and state in Aleofane was to speak of human life without breath, of the noon sky without the sun. The religion had grown to be the inner spirit of government. Never had there existed so religious a state. It could accomplish nothing except through its ecclesiastical organisation. It could affect the spirits of all the nation in any direction it pleased. It is true the people jealously guarded the traditional creed. But by gradual and impalpable change in the teachings of the priests or in the ceremonies the national mind could be bent in any way to suit the governors.