Mark Twain
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT by Samuel L. Clemens
Extrait Chapitre XIII - Freemen
"We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In half an hour we came upon a
group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road.
They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they were so
flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that at first they were not able to
believe that I was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their
hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle -- a remark which embarrassed these
poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn't.
And yet they were not slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen.
Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small
"independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were
about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would have
been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility
and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort
of use or value in any rationally constructed world. And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded
minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and
banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams
had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to
believe it right and as it should be. The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical
state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse
himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter
there and become respectfully quiet.
The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were
freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they
could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and
his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying
him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering
him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a
moment's notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant
fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers
trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped
through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves
themselves, and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose
their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then
came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth,
then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon the
remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was
worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet
other taxes -- upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop,
none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the
freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the
freeman's daughter -- but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the
freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and
sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the
gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the
baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.
And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop's road
three days each -- gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and
a day or so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the
ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift
tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each
hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten
centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were
two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot
passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand
years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our
shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what
is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty,
and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city
cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to
shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror
-- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity
as it deserves.
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of
humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was
something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who,
with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign
over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families -- including the voter's; and
would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed
on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families --
INCLUDING HIS OWN.
They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't
ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man COULD have a say in the
government. I said I had seen one -- and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they
were all unhit -- at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again;
and state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and
he brought his fist down and said HE didn't believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily
get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference
must be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:
"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this
country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of
government."
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The
country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care
for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out,
become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To
be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is
pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from
Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free
governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have AT ALL
TIMES an undeniable and indefeasible right to ALTER THEIR FORM OF GOVERNMENT in such a
manner as they may think expedient."
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn
out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may
be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway,
and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted
to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express
dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six
shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to
speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members
furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of
direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes
needed was a new deal. The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have
been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the
Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution
grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say
it myself. Wherefore, the "deal" which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was of a
quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.
![](filo_html_txt_strhoma_cmp.gif)