"You ought to be hanged," said the Captain to his fellow, "to bring poor thieves to grief, who take nothing from any man, but only from churches." "But surely for such knaves," said I, "it is not fitting to put on court-mourning, if only on account of the expense. In fact why is it that one may not mourn for his personal father[[27]] though he may for the father of his country? Or why does the Privy Chamber even allow weeping to the children of the land, when, surely, that exhausts the lachrymal glands of the State, and when tears, too, are exempt from taxation?"
"You go too far," said the Captain, "the present administration must keep on in the course it has thus far pursued, if it is to distinguish itself from all its predecessors by the solicitude with which it watches over our grounds, our pennies and our purses."
"The negro-dealers," said the Doctor, but irrelevantly enough, "are still more watchful; for a slave-trader is more troubled by the unfitness of such or such an article--of men or slaves, than of his own wife. Even flexibility of limb and grace in dancing his human live-stock must possess and he cudgels them into it."
"Agriculture," he continued, "trade, manufactures, even national wealth and welfare, in short the bodies of his subjects, the worst despot can rear and nourish--but for their souls he can do nothing, without acting at every step against his own."
It has often occurred to me, whether mourning-regulations or delegations have not for their object that the sly and sad citizen may avail himself of the liberty of public mourning in order to throw in his domestic mourning into the common mass? Might he not lay up his individual sorrow over the mortality of his aunts, his cousins, till a general application occurred, and so, when the country had wound the condolatory crape round arm and sword, do up all the mourning in a lump and grieve under the same crape for a mother of the country and a step-mother? For courts 'twere easy. Nay, could not these, in fact, in the public mourning mourn for their relations in advance? Might not one, after all, let the whole nonsense drop?...
At last my new sovereign rode in his traveling carriage up on to the throne, and exchanged the coach-canopy for the throne-canopy. The Captain, before the coronation, held a petition in readiness, wherein with the defiance of a saddler, he demanded his money; after the coronation the Prince, like a diamond, had absorbed so much fiery splendor from his crown and his sceptre, that his creditor got his lawyer to draw up a new memorial in which he insisted merely on the interest. As he got nothing, not so much as a resolution, he determined to demand more. For he did not consider that our reigning providers in Scheerau seldom have any money. When we receive or send extraordinary embassies, when we have occasion for baptism or burial, not to mention wars, in such cases we have little or nothing but--extra-taxes, those metallic props and clamps of the rotten throne. In the exchequer-chest, as in heraldry, we denote silver by vacant space.
But both debtor and creditor soon found relief. The latter, the Captain, was marching, as cicerone, with his Gustavus through the cadet quarters and showing him everything for the sake of praising everything, because he was one day to put his head into a gorget--when the young Prince came in also and inspected all the apartments, not in order to forget all on the next saddle, but in order to observe nothing at all. I was sorry--for I had come in at the same time--that every professor relied upon it the Regent would number, if not every hair on his head, yet every lock in his peruke; for he did not so much as notice me and my dignity; very naturally, however, since such a dignity had already become an old story with him, as seen in the finest salons of all lands. He wore--for how long had he been back from his travels?--the princely hat with the nonchalance of a lady's hat; no long administration had yet pressed in the crown to make a dark line around his brow, and the erect persons around him had not yet been refracted by the media and moisture and membranes of his eye into crooked prison-laborers. His words he handed round with the munificence of a man of the world, as he would so much snuff; at last Falkenberg also got a pinch. I see my two principals still standing vis-a-vis--my noble and lending principal with the firm but respectful decorum of a soldier, compressed into embonpoint and swelling muscles, and with the confiding kindliness which good-natured persons cherish towards every one who is at the moment talking with them--the crowned and insolvent principal, however, with the picturesque dignity, in which every limb bends inward respectfully to the others, and in which the very attitude is a prolonged flattery, with a drapery of many folds in his pain-racked face, with a complaisance which neither refuses nor consents. My god-father regarded the stereotype complacency of the crowned head as exclusively directed to him; he thought the latter put his questions for the sake of getting an answer; and particularly when my most gracious prince and sovereign had actually expressed himself to the effect that "the little Gustavus was in his place here," that "he excited a stronger interest by his air de réveur, than one could explain to himself," and that "so soon as he should be old enough for this institution, one would buy him off from his father for 13,000 Rix dollars cash down:" then was the Captain thrown out of his wits, or rather out of his petition; his petitionary paper was turned into a thanksgiving address; his wish was, that I had already been tutor in his home for eight years; his hope was, the money would follow; and the real advantage was, that his son would get into the best German military academy.
It will be doing me no favor if any one ridicules him. To be sure he swore at his castle: "He wouldn't trust courtiers a hand's breath, and the whole nation was an offence to his nostrils;" on the other hand, he trusted such court-people as he had, at the moment, to do with him, somewhat more, only--military ignorantia legum must bear much of the blame in his case; how is he, as a soldier, to know that a prince is not bound to pay any debt?--Perhaps it is not even known to all readers so well as they may assume to themselves. For three reasons a regent need not pay a farthing which he has borrowed of his subjects (if his royal father was the borrower, it is understood, of course). First: an ambassador, be he of the first or third rank, would fly into the face of the oldest publicists, if he should discharge his debts; now he who is the mere representative and brimstone printed copy of the regent, cannot possibly have rights which are denied the original, consequently is not paid. Secondly: The prince is--or else we can no longer believe another word of our academical afternoon lessons--the true summary, abstract and representative of the State (as the envoy, again, is a representative of the representative or a portable state in small), and consequently so stands for each member of the body politic that lends him a kreutzer, as if he himself were that member; accordingly he in reality lends to himself, when such a part and parcel of his representative self makes him a loan. Very well! that is granted; but then one must also grant that a prince would make himself as ridiculous if he should pay back to his own subjects, as the father of General Sobouroff did when he honorably refunded to himself the capital which he had advanced to himself, with the legal interest of the country, and paid the penalty to himself according to the statutes of exchange; whence could it come then, except from their relationship to the throne and its privileges, that even great ones, great in reference to rank and amount of debts, were allowed to become bankrupt? Or why is a legal consensus book or register of mortgages the most exact Court Blue-book or Almanac royal? Thirdly: The most botched subject can secure from his prince letters of respite or moratoria; but who shall give them to the prince, unless he does it to himself? And if he does not do it for conscience sake, he can at least every five years grant a renewed quinquennial.
But there is no fourth reason that I know of.