Curious Republic of Gondour | Page 3

no place in the
government. Brains and property managed the state. A candidate for
office must have marked ability, education, and high character, or he
stood no sort of chance of election. If a hod-carrier possessed these, he
could succeed; but the mere fact that he was a hod-carrier could not
elect him, as in previous times.
It was now a very great honour to be in the parliament or in office;
under the old system such distinction had only brought suspicion upon

a man and made him a helpless mark for newspaper contempt and
scurrility. Officials did not need to steal now, their salaries being vast
in comparison with the pittances paid in the days when parliaments
were created by hod-carriers, who viewed official salaries from a
hod-carrying point of view and compelled that view to be respected by
their obsequious servants. Justice was wisely and rigidly administered;
for a judge, after once reaching his place through the specified line of
promotions, was a permanency during good behaviour. He was not
obliged to modify his judgments according to the effect they might
have upon the temper of a reigning political party.
The country was mainly governed by a ministry which went out with
the administration that created it. This was also the case with the chiefs
of the great departments. Minor officials ascended to their several
positions through well-earned promotions, and not by a jump from gin-
mills or the needy families and friends of members of parliament. Good
behaviour measured their terms of office.
The head of the governments the Grand Caliph, was elected for a term
of twenty years. I questioned the wisdom of this. I was answered that
he could do no harm, since the ministry and the parliament governed
the land, and he was liable to impeachment for misconduct. This great
office had twice been ably filled by women, women as aptly fitted for it
as some of the sceptred queens of history. Members of the cabinet,
under many administrations, had been women.
I found that the pardoning power was lodged in a court of pardons,
consisting of several great judges. Under the old regime, this important
power was vested in a single official, and he usually took care to have a
general jail delivery in time for the next election.
I inquired about public schools. There were plenty of them, and of free
colleges too. I inquired about compulsory education. This was received
with a smile, and the remark:
"When a man's child is able to make himself powerful and honoured
according to the amount of education he acquires, don't you suppose
that that parent will apply the compulsion himself? Our free schools

and free colleges require no law to fill them."
There was a loving pride of country about this person's way of speaking
which annoyed me. I had long been unused to the sound of it in my
own. The Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears;
therefore I was glad to leave that country and come back to my dear
native land, where one never hears that sort of music.

A MEMORY,
When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamoured of but
one poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew
him will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but
one poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons
who know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the
poem which I composed was not the one which my father was
enamoured of, persons who may have known us both will not need to
have this truth shot into them with a mountain howitzer before they can
receive it. My father and I were always on the most distant terms when
I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality so to speak. At irregular
intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be
candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always
divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my
father did the breaking, and I did the suffering. As a general thing I was
a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy; but I once jumped off a
two-story table; another time I gave an elephant a "plug" of tobacco
and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time I
pretended to be talking in my sleep, and got off a portion of a very
wretched original conundrum in the hearing of my father. Let us not
pry into the result; it was of no consequence to any one but me.
But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and
achieving his