A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (books for 7th graders txt) đ
- Author: Mark Twain
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âWages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little, as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and forty years more thereâll be at least one country where the mechanicâs average wage will be two hundred cents a day!â
It knocked them absolutely dumb! Not a man of them could get his breath for upwards of two minutes. Then the coal-burner said prayerfully:
âMight I but live to see it!â
âIt is the income of an earl!â said Smug.
âAn earl, say ye?â said Dowley; âye could say more than that and speak no lie; thereâs no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath an income like to that. Income of an earlâmf! itâs the income of an angel!â
âNow, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages. In that remote day, that man will earn, with one weekâs work, that bill of goods which it takes you upwards of fifty weeks to earn now. Some other pretty surprising things are going to happen, too. Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?â
âSometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all, the magistrate. Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes the wages.â
âDoesnât ask any of those poor devils to help him fix their wages for them, does he?â
âHm! That were an idea! The master thatâs to pay him the money is the one thatâs rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.â
âYesâbut I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have who do work. You see? Theyâre a âcombineââa trade union, to coin a new phraseâwho band themselves together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years henceâso says the unwritten lawâthe âcombineâ will be the other way, and then how these fine peopleâs posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing; and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle.â
âDo ye believeââ
âThat he actually will help to fix his own wages? Yes, indeed. And he will be strong and able, then.â
âBrave times, brave times, of a truth!â sneered the prosperous smith.
âOh,âand thereâs another detail. In that day, a master may hire a man for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time, if he wants to.â
âWhat?â
âItâs true. Moreover, a magistrate wonât be able to force a man to work for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man wants to or not.â
âWill there be no law or sense in that day?â
âBoth of them, Dowley. In that day a man will be his own property, not the property of magistrate and master. And he can leave town whenever he wants to, if the wages donât suit him!âand they canât put him in the pillory for it.â
âPerdition catch such an age!â shouted Dowley, in strong indignation. âAn age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and respect for authority! The pilloryââ
âOh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution. I think the pillory ought to be abolished.â
âA most strange idea. Why?â
âWell, Iâll tell you why. Is a man ever put in the pillory for a capital crime?â
âNo.â
âIs it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small offense and then kill him?â
There was no answer. I had scored my first point! For the first time, the smith wasnât up and ready. The company noticed it. Good effect.
âYou donât answer, brother. You were about to glorify the pillory a while ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isnât going to use it. I think the pillory ought to be abolished. What usually happens when a poor fellow is put in the pillory for some little offense that didnât amount to anything in the world? The mob try to have some fun with him, donât they?â
âYes.â
âThey begin by clodding him; and they laugh themselves to pieces to see him try to dodge one clod and get hit with another?â
âYes.â
âThen they throw dead cats at him, donât they?â
âYes.â
âWell, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies in that mob and here and there a man or a woman with a secret grudge against himâand suppose especially that he is unpopular in the community, for his pride, or his prosperity, or one thing or anotherâstones and bricks take the place of clods and cats presently, donât they?â
âThere is no doubt of it.â
âAs a rule he is crippled for life, isnât he?âjaws broken, teeth smashed out?âor legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off?âor an eye knocked out, maybe both eyes?â
âIt is true, God knoweth it.â
âAnd if he is unpopular he can depend on dying , right there in the stocks, canât he?â
âHe surely can! One may not deny it.â
âI take it none of you are unpopularâby reason of pride or insolence, or conspicuous prosperity, or any of those things that excite envy and malice among the base scum of a village? You wouldnât think it much of a risk to take a chance in the stocks?â
Dowley winced, visibly. I judged he was hit. But he didnât betray it by any spoken word. As for the others, they spoke out plainly, and with strong feeling. They said they had seen enough of the stocks to know what a manâs chance in them was, and they would never consent to enter them if they could compromise on a quick death by hanging.
âWell, to change the subjectâfor I think Iâve established my point that the stocks ought to be abolished. I think some of our laws are pretty unfair. For instance, if I do a thing which ought to deliver me to the stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep still and donât report me, you will get the stocks if anybody informs on you.â
âAh, but that would serve you but right,â said Dowley, âfor you must inform. So saith the law.â
The others coincided.
âWell, all right, let it go, since you vote me down. But thereâs one thing which certainly isnât fair. The magistrate fixes a mechanicâs wage at one cent a day, for instance. The law says that if any master shall venture, even under utmost press of business, to pay anything over that cent a day, even for a single day, he shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he did it and doesnât inform, they also shall be fined and pilloried. Now it seems to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us, that because you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within a week you have paid a cent and fifteen milââ
Oh, I tell you it was a smasher! You ought to have seen them to go to pieces, the whole gang. I had just slipped up on poor smiling and complacent Dowley so nice and easy and softly, that he never suspected anything was going to happen till the blow came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.
A fine effect. In fact, as fine as any I ever produced, with so little time to work it up in.
But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little. I was expecting to scare them, but I wasnât expecting to scare them to death. They were mighty near it, though. You see they had been a whole lifetime learning to appreciate the pillory; and to have that thing staring them in the face, and every one of them distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I chose to go and reportâwell, it was awful, and they couldnât seem to recover from the shock, they couldnât seem to pull themselves together. Pale, shaky, dumb, pitiful? Why, they werenât any better than so many dead men. It was very uncomfortable. Of course, I thought they would appeal to me to keep mum, and then we would shake hands, and take a drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an end. But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly oppressed and suspicious people, a people always accustomed to having advantage taken of their helplessness, and never expecting just or kind treatment from any but their own families and very closest intimates. Appeal to me to be gentle, to be fair, to be generous? Of course, they wanted to, but they couldnât dare.
THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES
Well, what had I better do? Nothing in a hurry, sure. I must get up a diversion; anything to employ me while I could think, and while these poor fellows could have a chance to come to life again. There sat Marco, petrified in the act of trying to get the hang of his miller-gunâturned to stone, just in the attitude he was in when my pile-driver fell, the toy still gripped in his unconscious fingers. So I took it from him and proposed to explain its mystery. Mystery! a simple little thing like that; and yet it was mysterious enough, for that race and that age.
I never saw such an awkward people, with machinery; you see, they were totally unused to it. The miller-gun was a little double-barreled tube of toughened glass, with a neat little trick of a spring to it, which upon pressure would let a shot escape. But the shot wouldnât hurt anybody, it would only drop into your hand. In the gun were two sizesâwee mustard-seed shot, and another sort that were several times larger. They were money. The mustard-seed shot represented milrays, the larger ones mills. So the gun was a purse; and very handy, too; you could pay out money in the dark with it, with accuracy; and you could carry it in your mouth; or in your vest pocket, if you had one. I made them of several sizesâone size so large that it would carry the equivalent of a dollar. Using shot for money was a good thing for the government; the metal cost nothing, and the money couldnât be counterfeited, for I was the only person in the kingdom who knew how to manage a shot tower. âPaying the shotâ soon came to be a common phrase. Yes, and I knew it would still be passing menâs lips, away down in the nineteenth century, yet none would suspect how and when it originated.
The king joined us, about this time, mightily refreshed by his nap, and feeling good. Anything could make me nervous now, I was so uneasyâfor our lives were in danger; and so it worried me to detect a complacent something in the kingâs eye which seemed to indicate that he had been loading himself up for a performance of some kind or other; confound it, why must he go and choose such a time as this?
I was right. He began, straight off, in the most innocently artful, and transparent, and lubberly way, to lead up to the subject of agriculture. The cold sweat broke out all over me. I wanted to whisper in his ear, âMan, we are in awful danger! every moment is
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