The Monikins

by James Fenimore Cooper

A vacancy occurred, the second day of the eclipse, among the representatives of Bivouac, and the candidate of the Horizontals would certainly have been chosen to fill it, but for a contretemps connected with this affair of motives. The individual in question had lately performed that which, in most other countries, and under other circumstances, would have passed for an act of creditable national feeling; but which, quite as a matter of course, was eagerly presented to the electors, by his opponents, as a proof of his utter unfitness to be intrusted with their interests. The friends of the candidate took the alarm, and indignantly denied the charges of the Perpendiculars, affirming that their monikin had been well paid for what he had done. In an evil hour, the candidate undertook to explain, by means of a handbill, in which he stated that he had been influenced by no other motive than a desire to do that which he believed to be right. Such a person was deemed to be wanting in natural abilities, and, as a matter of course, he was defeated; for your Leaplow elector was not such an ass as to confide the care of his interests to one who knew so little how to take care of his own.

About this time, too, a celebrated dramatist produced a piece in which the hero performed prodigies under the excitement of patriotism, and the labor of his pen was incontinently damned for his pains; both pit and boxes—the galleries dissenting—deciding that it was out of all nature to represent a monikin incurring danger in this unheard-of manner, without a motive. The unhappy wight altered the last scene, by causing his hero to be rewarded by a good, round sum of money, when the piece had a very respectable run for the rest of the season, though I question if it ever were as popular as it would have been, had this precaution been taken before it was first acted.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MOTIVES TO A LEGISLATOR—MORAL CONSECUTIVENESS, COMETS, KITES, AND A CONVOY; WITH SOME EVERY-DAY LEGISLATION; TOGETHER WITH CAUSE AND EFFECT.

Legislation, during the occultation of the great moral postulate Principle by the passage of Pecuniary Interest, is, at the best, but a melancholy affair. It proved to be peculiarly so with us just at that moment, for the radiance of the divine property had been a good deal obscured in the houses, for a long time previously, by the interference of various minor satellites. In nothing, therefore, did the deplorable state of things which existed make itself more apparent, than in our proceedings.

As Captain Poke and myself, notwithstanding our having taken different stands in politics, still continued to live together, I had better opportunities to note the workings of the obscuration on the ingenuous mind of my colleague than on that of most other persons. He early began to keep a diary of his expenses, regularly deducting the amount at night from the sum of eight dollars, and regarding the balance as so much clear gain. His conversation, too, soon betrayed a leaning to his personal interests, instead of being of that pure and elevated cast which should characterize the language of a statesman. He laid down the position, pretty dogmatically, that legislation, after all, was work; that “the laborer was worthy of his hire”; and that, for his part, he felt no great disposition to go through the vexation and trouble of helping to make laws, unless he could see, with a reasonable certainty, that something was to be got by it. He thought Leaplow had quite laws enough as it was—more than she respected or enforced—and if she wanted any more, all she had to do was to pay for them. He should take an early occasion to propose that all our wages—or, at any rate, his own; others might do as they pleased—should be raised, at the very least, two dollars a day, and this while he merely sat in the house; for he wished to engage me to move, by way of amendment, that as much more should be given to the committees. He did not think it was fair to exact of a member to be a committee-man for nothin’, although most of them were committee-men for nothin’; and if we were called on to keep two watches, in this manner, the least that could be done would be to give us TWO PAYS. He said, considering it in the most favorable point of view, that there was great wear and tear of brain in legislation, and he should never be the man he was before he engaged in the trade; he assured me that his idees, sometimes, were so complicated that he did not know where to find the one he wanted, and that he had wished for a cauda, a thousand times, since he had been in the house, for, by keeping the end of it in his hand, like the bight of a rope, he might always have suthin’ tangible to cling to. He told me, as a great secret, that he was fairly tired of rummaging among his thoughts for the knowledge necessary to understand what was going on, and that he had finally concluded to put himself, for the rest of the session, under the convoy of a God-like. He had been looking out for a fit fugleman of this sort, and he had pretty much determined to follow the signal of the great God-like of the Parpendic’lars, like the rest of them, for it would occasion less confusion in the ranks, and enable him to save himself a vast deal of trouble in making up his mind. He didn’t know, on the whole, but eight dollars a day might give a living profit, provided he could throw all the thinking on his God-like, and turn his attention to suthin’ else; he thought of writing his v’y’ges, for he understood that anything from foreign parts took like wild-fire in Leaplow; and if they didn’t take, he could always project charts for a living.

Perhaps it will be necessary to explain what Noah meant by saying that he thought of engaging a God-like. The reader has had some insight into the nature of one set of political leaders in Leaplow, who are known by the name of the Most Patriotic Patriots. These persons, it is scarcely necessary to say, are always with the majority, or in a situation to avail themselves of the evolutions of the little wheel. Their great rotatory principle keeps them pretty constantly in motion, it is true; but while there is a centrifugal force to maintain this action, great care has been had to provide a centripetal counterpoise, in order to prevent them from bolting out of the political orbit. It is supposed to be owing to this peculiarity in their party organizations, that your Leaplow patriot is so very remarkable for going round and round a subject, without ever touching it.

As an offset to this party arrangement, the Perpendiculars have taken refuge in the God-likes. A God-like, in Leaplow politics, in some respects resembles a saint in the Catholic calendar; that is to say, he is canonized, after passing through a certain amount of temptation and vice with a whole skin; after having his cause pleaded for a certain number of years before the high authorities of his party; and, usually, after having had a pretty good taste of purgatory. Canonization attained, however, all gets to be plain sailing with him. He is spared, singular as it may appear, even a large portion of his former “wear and tear” of brains, as Noah had termed it, for nothing puts one so much at liberty in this respect, as to have full powers to do all the thinking. Thinking in company, like travelling in company, requires that we should have some respect to the movements, wishes, and opinions of others; but he who gets a carte blanche for his sentiments, resembles the uncaged bird, and may fly in whatever direction most pleases himself, and feel confident, as he goes, that his ears will be saluted with the usual traveller’s signal of “all’s right.” I can best compare the operation of your God-like and his votaries, to the action of a locomotive with its railroad train. As that goes, this follows; faster or slower, the movement is certain to be accompanied; when the steam is up they fly, when the fire is out they crawl, and that, too, with a very uneasy sort of motion; and when a bolt is broken, they who have just been riding without the smallest trouble to themselves, are compelled to get out and push the load ahead as well as they can, frequently with very rueful faces, and in very dirty ways. The cars whisk about, precisely as the locomotive whisks about, all the turn-outs are necessarily imitated, and, in short, one goes after the other very much as it is reasonable to suppose will happen when two bodies are chained together, and the entire moving power is given to only one of them. A God-like in Leaplow, moreover, is usually a Riddle. It was the object of Noah to hitch on to one of these moral steam-tugs, in order that he too might be dragged through his duties without effort to himself; an expedient, as the old sealer expressed it, that would in some degree remedy his natural want of a cauda, by rendering him nothing but tail.

“I expect, Sir John,” he said, for he had a practice of expecting by way of conjecture, “I expect this is the reason why the Leaplowers dock themselves. They find it more convenient to give up the management of their affairs to some one of these God-likes, and fall into his wake like the tail of a comet, which makes it quite unnecessary to have any other cauda.”

“I understand you; they amputate to prevent tautology.”

Noah rarely spoke of any project until his mind was fairly made up; and the execution usually soon followed the proposition. The next thing I heard of him, therefore, he was fairly under the convoy, as he called it, of one of the most prominent of the Riddles. Curious to know how he liked the experiment, after a week’s practice, I called his attention to the subject, by a pretty direct inquiry.