Chapter 359: Sir Knight of the Order of Merit
Chapter 356 The Sir of the Order of Merit
London, Westminster, Chancery Hall.
Arthur had just gotten out of his car when he saw several rows of close-guarded cavalrymen patrolling side-by-side with small steps walking through the streets of Whitehall Street.
He customarily fires up his gun, looks at the group of guys on high horses, and mouths the words, “So tight? It’s not necessary to fight against cholera to this extent, right? Is something else going on in London these days?”
Louis, who accompanied him, spoke up, “It is true that the dispatch of the close guard cavalry is not for cholera control. I spoke briefly with the other police secretaries in the hall this morning. They said that the parliamentary reforms, the Swain riots, cholera plus the shooting in Liverpool are all crammed together, so everyone’s nerves are on high alert right now, whether it’s the parliament or the cabinet.
Although there has been no major disorder in London during this time, small-scale disturbances have been occurring, with one or two occurring almost every day. It is said that the Duke of Wellington had once suggested to send out the army to solve the problem, but was later persuaded by Sir Peel. However, given the current lack of policing forces in London, the Ministry of the Interior finally decided to send disarmed close-guard cavalry to participate in the patrols.”
“So that’s how it is?”
Arthur took a look at the passing close guard cavalry, “No wonder they all have a civilized staff on their waist. If you hadn’t said anything, I would have thought these guys stole it from Scotland Yard.”
Louis sniffed with an odd face and said, “The noble Konoha cavalry would still steal?”
“Noble? They stopped being noble a long time ago.”
Arthur spoke, “Although most of the close guard cavalry used to be noble children, because of the war that Britain fought with your uncle, the first crop of noble children have all pretty much died. If we continue to adhere to this selection standard, then our soldiers will definitely not be able to keep up. So, since then, the standard for the Konoha cavalry has been downgraded to good citizen’s children.”
Louis returned, “France is no better. The highest average quality of French soldiers was also when the Revolution first began. When my uncle led them into central Europe, a number of Germans and Swiss were attracted by the tall, handsome looks and neat, handsome uniforms, so they joined the French service.
And to the late Napoleonic wars, not only no way to ensure that the soldiers are tall and handsome, and even the uniforms of the soldiers can not be guaranteed to be neat and tidy, marching, walking and rainbow-like, it is really ugly. Worst of all, a lot of these guys are still rogue gangsters just released from prison, so as you know, you can hardly find out any military discipline from these guys, let alone chivalry.”
Arthur sipped his cigarette, “It seems that in this regard, Britain and France are still really difficult. When I was chatting with the Duke of Wellington earlier, he mentioned this to me.”
As soon as Louis heard Wellington’s name, he immediately became interested. Other than studying his own uncle, his greatest hobby was studying this uncle’s lifelong enemy.
“What did His Excellency the Duke say?”
Arthur thought back for a moment and then whirled around to imitate the old duke’s tone that was cold with some impatience.
“I led a proud iron army during the Peninsular War. They were always able to follow through on my orders and bet their lives on it. It always hurts to have to see such fine lads sacrifice their lives, and that is why I hate war.
But when it came to the battle of Waterloo, it was a different matter. At that time, I was leading what was nothing less than a bunch of Britannia’s social garbage. They were thieving, criminal, undisciplined, and it seemed as if it would kill them to walk in formation. That’s why I’ve never considered Waterloo to be the greatest moment of my life; I’m not interested in standing in the garbage.”
Hearing this, Louis couldn’t help but laugh outright, “It seems that great characters always have similarities, whether they hate soldiering or advocate the use of force to suppress riots. However, Duke Wellington’s character is still more introverted than my uncle’s. If it was my uncle standing in Duke Wellington’s position, he custodian could not listen to Sir Pierre’s words and could not have agreed to let the Close Guard Cavalry change into civilized staffs.”
When Arthur heard this, he suddenly remembered the previous book of Napoleon’s biography.
He took a deep breath of the cold air of the streets of London: “His Excellency the Duke’s introverted character is precisely the luck of Britain. As far as I know, in the past half century, the barricades of Paris have only suffered defeat when facing Napoleon.”
Louis also knew what Arthur was talking about.
Napoleon had gotten his start precisely by helping the Hot Mooners put down the Portuguese Moon Riots, and when the Royalists had broken out into a massive uprising in Paris, Napoleon had responded to them with forty guns. The Parisian barricades, which Louis XVI and others could not manage with their dead weight, lasted only an hour in front of Napoleon.
Louis also knows that this kind of black history is not too good to put on the stage, but he did not directly answer, but changed the expression to cover his embarrassment.
“My uncle did go a bit too far that time. If it was in my place, I would definitely be able to do it more properly than him.”
Arthur raised his eyebrows and laughed, “Is that so? Are you going to go and reason with the mob?”
“No, I don’t do stupid things like that, I like to prevent things before they happen.”
Louis raised his head confidently and picked up the Liverpool city center remodeling document and waved it towards Arthur, “If I’m lucky enough to serve France one day, then I’ll completely remodel Paris. I’ll have to straighten out all those curved narrow alleys in Paris, and no one will be able to build barricades in Paris for fuck’s sake.”
“Sounds good, at least it’s better than cannons.”
Arthur said with his pipe in his mouth, “It seems that this time, it is indeed a wise move to let you participate in drafting the plan for the transformation of the Liverpool urban area. And regardless of what the Treasury and Parliament think of this thing, at the very least you’ve gained experience from it.”
Arthur and Louis were chatting when suddenly his afterglow caught a glimpse of a young clerk in his twenties coming down the steps of the Chancellor’s Hall.
It was none other than Edwin Chadwick, private secretary to Lord Chancellor Brougham.
Chadwick was about to board the carriage, but suddenly realized that someone was at him, and he turned his head just in time to meet Arthur’s line of sight.
“Superintendent Hastings?”
Arthur raised his hand with a smile on his face and greeted him, “Hello again.”
Chadwick noticed the stitches in the corner of Arthur’s eye and felt a little overwhelmed as he turned to apologize, “The word is all over Whitehall Street about your time in Liverpool. To have you risk your life to go there to supervise smuggling affairs and cholera control, and not to have enough extra men assigned to you, that was really a lack of consideration on our part.”
“No need to apologize.”
Arthur smiled and waved his hand, “There are not a few officers in the Royal Navy and Army who are missing arms and legs, the Duke of Wellington is deaf in one ear, and General Nelson lost an arm early that year. I’m not a soldier, but as a police officer, I’ve long been prepared for being wounded.”
Despite Arthur’s words, as one of the main people who proposed sending Arthur to Liverpool, Chadwick ultimately felt a little embarrassed.
He patted his chest and assured, “The assassination case has already happened, and it’s useless to regret the past even if you do. However, I assure you that we will definitely punish the mastermind behind it severely. That scar on your face doesn’t just belong to you personally, but also to the Chancellor’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, the General Customs Administration, and the Central Health Committee that appointed you.”
Arthur was not particularly moved by the emotion of seeing Chadwick speak so eloquently. After all, he knew that the man who really talked the talk was not here.
But Chadwick, although he could not represent the Chancellery, naturally had his value as Lord Brougham’s closer.
Arthur spoke, “Edwin, for your help, I am grateful. But at a time like the present, I feel that the focus should still be on cholera control. The document I sent back from Liverpool a while ago, did Lord Brougham receive it on his side?”
“That report?” Chadwick nodded with a smile and said, “That report was written in great detail, and the inferences about the cholera pathogen and the recommendations for the relevant new treatments were well reasoned. After Lord Brougham saw it, he organized all the medical authorities in the Central Health Committee to study and discuss it on the same day. It’s just that ……”
Arthur had a feeling about this and asked, “The various medical authorities do not approve of salt supplementation therapy?”
“You guessed it.” Chadwick said awkwardly, “But although they don’t approve of it, under Lord Brougham’s persuasion, the doctors finally and reluctantly agreed to list salt supplementation therapy in the new edition of the Cholera Prevention Manual. Before that, however, they needed the pioneer of this therapy to come to London and answer a few small questions in their presence.”
“What questions?”
Chadwick turned over the memorandum of the meeting in his hands and listed them one by one, “First, why is the concentration of saline injected at 0.9%? Second, why was alcohol applied to the skin at the injection site before the injection? Third, why must needles and syringes be boiled for 10 minutes before use? Fourth ……”
Arthur had thought that relying on the paper that Hardcastle had been withheld from him would have helped to explain the queries of the health commissioners, but when he heard this, he realized that although the health commissioners had not questioned Hardcastle’s theories, the 21st-century common-sense questions that he had casually added to the list had been questioned one by one instead.
If the health commissioners insisted on asking Arthur why, then he could only tell them that the first one was taught in junior high school biology class. As for the second and third, it was because that’s what he had seen the doctors do when he used to get shots in the hospital.
Although all of this knowledge is common sense in the 21st century, in this era where even the concept of sterilization is not very clear, how to give the doctors a clear explanation of this reason is really a big problem.
From Arthur’s observation of the hospitals, most of them wouldn’t even be able to change a clean sheet every day if cholera wasn’t coming and the miasma and contagionist factions were arguing over the causative agent.
In normal times, the operating rooms in all places, whether they were high-end royal hospitals or inexpensive street clinics, looked like the bloody, dirty mess described by Darwin, who had abandoned medicine for God.
Combined with the hacksaw and other horrific instruments on the operating table, if you were to walk in here, you would never know whether you were in a hospital or a meat processing plant.
And to make matters worse, Hudsucker can never be brought to the table because of his medical ethics. Otherwise, a few bigwigs on the Liverpool Council would have blown the whistle on his unauthorized autopsies.
If that happened, the Lancet and the London Journal of Internal Medicine would have to put him on trial in a separate medical ethics issue, not to mention the promotion of salt therapy.
Arthur pondered for a while, and suddenly remembered that little old Yorker he knew in Liverpool. At a time like this, he could only count on the professional lad to come up with some self-justifying reasons for him.
If even he couldn’t, then Arthur would have to go to the University of London’s teaching hospital to sideline Professor Marsden and see if he could get some words out of him.
“It’s normal for members to have concerns, it rather shows their responsible attitude towards public health. Since I advocated the necessity of salt replenishment therapy to the Chancellor’s Office, it is naturally my part to answer their concerns for them. When I get back today, I’ll send a letter to Liverpool, and they’ll soon send an expert.”
Chadwick was also relieved to hear that, “That’s best. Honestly, Arthur, if the salt replenishment therapy is as miraculous as you say, then the frighteningly high mortality rate of cholera will soon come down. In that case, the clergymen’s mouths would also be able to shut up obediently.”
“Clerics?” Louis frowned, “Are those guys spouting off again?”
Chadwick spoke with a bit of anger when he thought about it, “That’s right. And it’s not just the clergy, some of the guys who don’t have a brain in their head are going along with them. The clergymen say that cholera is God’s punishment for a morally bankrupt society, and those guys who live in the West End and have nothing better to do go even further, preaching that cholera only infects the poor, and that noble, clean-cut ladies and gentlemen like them won’t catch it.”
“Did it really turn out that way?”
“Of course not.”
Chadwick taunted, “There was a brainless guy who went wandering off to the East End to prove he couldn’t catch cholera. Turns out the man went there in the morning, the disease showed up at noon, the body was transported at night, and it infected all of his family along with it. If we hadn’t realized it in time and rushed that family to quarantine, it would have triggered a large-scale epidemic in the Western District. From my point of view, cholera doesn’t only infect the poor, but it specializes in those with low IQs.”
Arthur asked, “Unfortunately, at least after this time, these people can finally stop, right?”
“Settle down?” Chadwick gasped and laughed, “Arthur, you really overestimate them. What they’re saying now is that the guy got sick solely because he wasn’t religious enough, and that true believers don’t catch cholera.”
Arthur shook his head hopelessly even after hearing this, “Why is it always like this? As soon as something goes wrong you have to blame the gods, when it’s obvious that humans themselves are enough to commit all the crimes.”
“Or else?” Chadwick sighed, “Is it hard to believe that you still want them to blame themselves?”
Speaking of which, Chadwick suddenly looked up at the sky, “It’s getting late, and I still have to go over to the Central Health Council for a meeting. You’re here to see Lord Brougham, aren’t you? He’s inside. Oh yes, Viscount Melbourne, the Home Secretary, is also there, so if you haven’t asked him to debrief you’ll just save yourself another trip to the Home Office.”
“What is Viscount Melbourne doing here?”
Chadwick smiled at his words and patted Arthur’s shoulder, “Good things, of course. Regarding the preparatory meeting for the establishment of the London District Prosecutor’s Office, Arthur, congratulations, the position of the Deputy Prosecutor General, basically, has been finalized. But I don’t know whether this is good or bad for you ……”
“What does that mean?”
Chadwick replied, “Because you’ve got a big job ahead of you, the prosecution of the prisoners of the Swain Riots is something that the Home Office and the Lord Chancellor’s Department intend to leave entirely in your hands. However, for the sake of our friendship, I will give you another wind ……
Because Lord Brougham and Viscount Melbourne also know that this is not a good thing to do, and it is easy to get a bad reputation. Plus you just got shot in Liverpool, so they’re thinking of compensating you in other ways.”
Arthur sensed a hint of something wrong in Chadwick’s words, “You mean ……”
Chadwick nodded slowly, a meaningful smile on his face, “That’s right, they intend to apply to the Prime Minister to honor you with a medal, a Sir Knight of the Inferior Order of Merit. It may not be long before your card is reprinted with a prefix – Sir Arthur Hastings.”
Arthur was more than half-pleased to hear this, instead he held his forehead and pronounced, “It seems you were right, this job should not be easy indeed.”
(End of chapter)