“And the Merchant answered him ‘I could let thee have that lot at ten thousand piastres the dozen.’
“And the Man chuckled inwardly, and said ‘Ten piastres the dozen I offer thee, and no more, oh descendant of a distinguished grandfather!’
“And the Merchant stroked his beard, and said ‘Hum! I will await the coming of thy friends,’ So he waited. And the Man waited with him. And they waited both together.”
“The manuscript breaks off here,” said Mein Herr, as he rolled it up again; “but it was enough to open our eyes. We saw what simpletons we had been—buying our Scholars much as those ignorant savages bought their eggs—and the ruinous system was abandoned. If only we could have abandoned, along with it, all the other fashions we had borrowed from you, instead of carrying them to their logical results! But it was not to be. What ruined my country, and drove me from my home, was the introduction—into the Army, of all places—of your theory of Political Dichotomy!”
“Shall I trouble you too much,” I said, “if I ask you to explain what you mean by ‘the Theory of Political Dichotomy’?”
“No trouble at all!” was Mein Herr’s most courteous reply. “I quite enjoy talking, when I get so good a listener. What started the thing, with us, was the report brought to us, by one of our most eminent statesmen, who had stayed some time in England, of the way affairs were managed there. It was a political necessity (so he assured us, and we believed him, though we had never discovered it till that moment) that there should be two Parties, in every affair and on every subject. In Politics, the two Parties, which you had found it necessary to institute, were called, he told us, ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’.”
“That must have been some time ago?” I remarked.
“It was some time ago,” he admitted. “And this was the way the affairs of the British Nation were managed. (You will correct me if I misrepresent it. I do but repeat what our traveler told us.) These two Parties—which were in chronic hostility to each other—took turns in conducting the Government; and the Party, that happened not to be in power, was called the ‘Opposition’, I believe?”
“That is the right name,” I said. “There have always been, so long as we have had a Parliament at all, two Parties, one ‘in’, and one ‘out’.”
“Well, the function of the ‘Ins’ (if I may so call them) was to do the best they could for the national welfare—in such things as making war or peace, commercial treaties, and so forth?”