Chapter 306: The King’s Power (K6)
Chapter 304 The King’s Power (4K6)
Louis stood at the window looking at Becky Sharp carrying her skirt and umbrella disappearing around the corner of the traffic-laden street, and waited until he came back to his senses, but then he looked back to see Arthur hunched over his desk writing and drawing something.
Louis came to the front to take a look, only to see that the writing on the manuscript paper is neither the latest issue of the Hastings Mysteries, nor is it the electrical thesis that Faraday urged Arthur to submit, but a sword score with drawings and descriptions.
Louis laughed and leaned against the wall and snickered, “Arthur, look what I see! An encyclopedic scholar, a contemporary Aristotle! Are you now not just satisfied with leaving monographs in the world of literature and science, but you even intend to take your place in the field of swordsmanship and combat? Aren’t you a bit too erudite?”
Louis’ jokes didn’t cause Arthur to stop writing, and while completing this guidebook on sword fighting, he even had room to explain why.
“Although I don’t feel that I can be compared to Aristotle, that doesn’t stop me from quoting his famous words: people think I’m smart, but I know myself that I actually know nothing. Nor am I doing this because of how smart I am, but due to His Majesty’s order.
That day in the theater, the Duke of Wellington, in order to make His Majesty the King happy, strongly advised him to carry forward the martial spirit of his early years of service in the Royal Navy, and to make full use of the resources at hand, to revise and reorganize the basic training of fencing for the Royal Navy, the Army and the Police Force. Originally, the Angelo brothers, the two Britannia sword masters are in the box, this kind of thing I can’t intervene in what to say.
But perhaps it was because we had released so much liquid carbon dioxide in the theater that day that it mesmerized His Majesty. Or perhaps it was because he valued my service at Scotland Yard and felt that a serving policeman like me was more experienced in street fighting. All in all, I’ve now become one of the drafters of the Police Force Basic Training Sword Art.”
“So that’s why you couldn’t take a break even after reporting sick leave?”
Louis Bonaparte couldn’t help but laugh out loud when he heard this, and he joked, “The king’s order? If you really don’t want to do this job, why don’t you just find a reason to decline? Anyway, Britain is a parliamentary decision, we these small police and not like the judges need to get the king’s approval to take office, we just don’t offend the Minister of the Interior is not on the line?”
Hearing this, Arthur put down his pen and stretched his back, “Perhaps the king of Britain is not as powerful as France, and even less likely to be as arbitrary as the Russian czar, but if you really don’t take his majesty seriously, then you will soon be retributed. Louis, you can’t take seriously all those things written in the newspapers of other European countries.
Those guys who tout Britain like crazy may not really know much about the island, and most of them are just using the touting of other countries as a way of venting their frustrations about their own. In this regard, Mr. Heine, whom we met earlier, is typical. You’ve been reading his books for a while now, and how many of those praises of France of his do you think are genuine?”
Hearing this, Louis slightly recalled some of Heine’s classic statements and couldn’t help but frown slightly.
Heine’s remarks praising France, Louis, as a descendant of the Napoleon family, was of course very flattered by them.
But what he couldn’t stand was that Heine not only praised Napoleonic France, but also often sang the praises of the current French July Dynasty.
Heine even referred to his decision to move from Düsseldorf to Paris after the French July Revolution as ‘leaving the muddy swamps for a breath of fresh air among the woodlands’.
To vividly demonstrate his attitude towards this pilgrimage-like move, Heine then also told Arthur and Louis a short story about his journey on the move.
As Heine was walking to a small seaside town in north-west France, he suddenly saw a number of farm wagons moving slowly along the main road, with many women, children and old people sitting in them, while the men followed them slowly, and, surprisingly, all of these people were actually speaking German.
Heine claimed, “Just at this moment I felt a sharp spasm, such as I had never felt before in my life. The blood in my whole body suddenly rose to the ventricles and pounded against my ribs, as if the blood were going to rush out of my chest, as if it had to rush out quickly. Breath suppressed in my throat. It was good that what I had encountered was my homeland itself.”
While in Germany, Heine often angrily lambasted the Germans in newspapers and magazines for their inherent mediocrity and spinelessness. He also came to France because he wanted to get away from his stale homeland.
However, when he met this group of people who spoke the same language as him in a foreign country, and saw that they were covered with dust, and more than ten of them could only share less than a pound of black bread for food, he said: “This scene moved me painfully. All such memories of exile, of hardship, of seeing my country in a state of distress, had vanished from my mind. Even its shortcomings suddenly struck me as honorable and lovable. I even reconciled myself to its shallow and narrow political views. I shook hands with it, with every peasant from Germany, as if I were shaking hands with the fatherland itself, and signaled a renewed reconciliation.”
Heine asked, “Why did you leave Germany?”
They replied, “The land is good, and we would love to stay there.”
“But we can’t stay.”
These honest farmers who fled from Germany certainly did not have Heine’s gorgeous rhetoric, they just used plain language to tell Heine about the hardships of living in Germany and about the German rulers’ tricks.
An eighty-year-old man explained to Heine that the reason why they left their homes was for the sake of their children, who were still young and could more easily adapt to life abroad, and might later be happy abroad: “What else would we do? Tell us to have a revolution?”
Their complaints and lamentations make Heine feel as if his heart is literally being torn out of his chest; he feels angry and a little sad.
As he wrote in his forthcoming Sketches of a Journey, “I dare wager before all the gods of heaven and earth that one-tenth of what these peasants endured in Germany would have been enough to cause thirty-six revolutions in France, and cause thirty-six kings to lose their thrones and heads. And yet, sadly, not even one such revolution has taken place in all the thirty-six states of Germany.”
Louis always felt a bit of a blockage in his heart when he thought of this.
On the one hand, he empathized with Heine’s words, but he and Heine were clearly thinking in different directions.
As a young man with liberal views, Louis could understand Heine’s feelings. But as a proud Bonaparte, he was a bit difficult to agree with Heine’s practice of clamoring to cut off the king’s head at every turn.
Louis shook his head and said: ”Although I don’t hate Mr. Heine. But in my opinion, his demand may be a bit too much, he thinks that Germany needs not only the same openness as Paris, but also the same parliamentary system as London. And all this seems to me almost impossible.”
When Arthur heard this, he did not deny it. He was less inclined to disclose his views to others, and what he preferred to do was to listen than to state himself.
Moreover …… for this Emperor’s secretary of his own, Arthur had also always maintained a rather forward observation priority. Arthur just smiled and asked, “And what do you think Germany needs?”
Louis pressed both hands on the window sill, he gazed at the cold rain outside the window and responded decisively, “I think this question is very simple, what Germany needs most at this time should be a Frederick the Great.”
“Wow ……” Arthur trailed off, as if deliberately teasing Louis’ emotions, “You mean that tyrant from Prussia?”
Louis didn’t deny the nickname Arthur gave Frederick the Great, he just quoted Voltaire’s famous words in Frederick’s defense: “It’s true what Voltaire said: the democracy of a thousand mice is not as good as the dictatorship of a lion. The death of Socrates also shows that the so-called plenary democracy is nothing but a terrible folly.
Therefore, from the ancient Greek period of Plato and Aristotle, which lasted until the Renaissance, people have been pursuing the existence of philosopher kings. As long as religious tolerance, reform of education and the legal system, rationalization of the administration and improvement of the people’s standard of living were practiced, then it was a philosopher king in the national interest, and Frederick the Great certainly did that in Prussia.
Although he was unable to abolish serfdom throughout Prussia because of the obstruction of the nobility, he succeeded in doing so, at least in his own dominions. It is true that he set harsh military rules and waged many wars, and many of his actions qualified him as a tyrant, but we must not forget that he was the first enlightened tyrant in Europe to allow limited freedom of the press.”
Arthur, seeing how determined he was, was not interested in getting into a heated debate with him on the subject.
It was true that he had some minor disagreements with Louis on the subject, but he had no intention of getting into a big fight about it.
As Mr. Disraeli, another good friend of Arthur’s, said – the easiest way to win someone’s heart, whether it be friendship or love, is to allow them to disprove you.
Arthur nodded slightly and said, “Frederick the Great does have a lot going for him, and in my opinion, at least he’s doing a lot better than his father. After all, his father spent seventy percent of his coffers on expanding his army, and even more insufferably, not only did he like to kidnap strong, able-bodied young men all over Europe to enlist in the Prussian army, but he also used to kidnap tall women in the same way to breed with them, in order to create what he saw as an indestructible and elite army like the Cyclops in ancient Greek mythology. ”
When Louis heard this, the emotion that had just risen was instantly suppressed, and he looked oddly like he wanted to laugh but felt he shouldn’t.
Louis asked, “Is the history education of the University of London to teach you this cold and eccentric knowledge all day long?”
Arthur shrugged his shoulders and said, “No, Louis, that’s not exactly out-of-the-way knowledge. The out-of-the-way ones, I haven’t even mentioned to you yet.”
“Hmm?” Louis wondered, “Is there anything more outlandish?”
Arthur sipped his tea, “Because of my relationship with the Royal Society, I was able to borrow some of their lesser known collections. I happened to turn up some articles from there attacking Mr. Leibniz that Sir Isaac Newton ordered his men to write back when he was president. There was an incident mentioned there about how Frederick I, the father of Frederick the Great, when he was on the throne, used to call Leibniz before him and give him a severe reprimand, saying that he was: ‘Simply a waste of space, unable even to stand guard.'”
Louis had thought that Arthur would reveal some shocking secret, but this sudden turn of events directly caused him to spurt out in laughter when he couldn’t hold back, “I had thought that the collection of jokes about my uncle in your stomach was rich enough, but I didn’t realize that not only do you like to collect the strange stories of the French emperors, but you don’t even intend to let go of the king of Prussia? ”
Arthur said with an innocent look, “Who knows? Maybe in the future I’ll even include Russian tsars in my story collection? But then again, both kings and emperors are human beings when it comes down to it, and I’ve always thought that all of them have one nose and two eyes, so it shouldn’t be any different. Louis, maybe you can be an emperor in the future. Although you may not be able to catch up with Frederick the Great, I think it would be better for you to be an emperor than Frederick the First. After all, as long as one is a normal person, it’s impossible to be like him and interrupt the priest’s prayers when he’s on his deathbed.”
“Interrupt a priest’s prayer? And what was that about?”
Arthur spoke, “At that time, Frederick I was on the verge of taking his last breath. The court chaplain then chanted at his side, ‘Naked I came into the world, and naked I go away.’ When Frederick I heard this, he struggled to get up from his bed, and said, ‘No! I cannot be allowed to go to God completely naked; go and bring me my uniform!'”
When Louis heard this, he laughed so hard that even his eyes narrowed, and he leaned against the window with his arms wrapped around him and said, “Arthur, you obviously don’t give a damn about these emperors and kings. If that’s the case, why are you pinching your nose and reluctantly carrying out the King of Britain’s order to compose that what’s-his-name Police Basic Swordsmanship? Obviously whether it’s the Emperor of France or the King of Prussia, they hold most of the power than the King of Britain.”
Arthur took a sip of tea and put down the teacup and said indifferently, “Louis, you haven’t come to Scotland Yard for a short period of time, have you meticulously understood the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829?”
“This ……”
Louis heard this and couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed, “I’ve memorized all the management regulations of Scotland Yard, but I really didn’t understand the Metropolitan Police Act in that much detail.”
Arthur just smiled when he heard this, “That’s okay, I’ll recite it to you. Article 1 of the Metropolitan Police Act: His Majesty the King has the right to establish a new police authority to maintain the security of metropolitan London and the surrounding areas, and His Majesty the King may appoint two persons to be the leaders of the police authority and to engage in the management of the police under the direct leadership of a government minister.”
“Well ……,” Louis frowned, “what’s so special about that?”
Arthur just shook his head at that as he stood up and patted Louis on the shoulder, “It’s not really special, but it makes a point, and it’s also logically stipulated in the general outline of the Greater London Police Department Management Regulations. On a legal level, the Greater London Police Authority and its subordinate London Metropolitan Police Force swear allegiance only to the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and are not under the direct authority of the government.
As for the Secretary of State for the Home Department, he can manage Scotland Yard because he has been appointed by His Majesty the King to be the supreme administrator of the Greater London Police Force for the time being. Therefore, the fact that I followed His Majesty’s order to prepare the Basic Sword Training Manual for the Police Force has nothing to do with who I put or do not put in my sights, as I am only being accountable to the source of my authority by carrying out my mission.”
When Louis heard this, he first stared blankly, then thoughtfully cupped his chin, he thought for a while and suddenly revealed a smile, “Interesting.”
Arthur also smiled back, “There are many interesting things in this world, this is just one of them. I told you earlier, even His Majesty the King of Britain is far from being as weak as you think. It’s just that in Britannia, His Majesty the King and our cabinet have gradually formed a delicate balanced relationship over the course of nearly half a century, so they aren’t very willing to use their power in most cases.”
Louis opened the window and took a deep breath, “Arthur, I always get something out of every conversation with you. But enough about that, over at the Royal Society, when you went to Mr. Faraday to borrow the instruments for the show, didn’t you promise him that you would submit a paper? How are you preparing that one? I was planning to make a trip there today, do you want me to drop it off for you on the way?”
(End of chapter)