Cashel Byron's Profession

Society was much occupied during Alice's first season in London with

the upshot of an historical event of a common kind. England, a few

years before, had stolen a kingdom from a considerable people in

Africa, and seized the person of its king. The conquest proved

useless, troublesome, and expensive; and after repeated attempts to

settle the country on impracticable plans suggested to the Colonial

Office by a popular historian who had made a trip to Africa, and by

generals who were tired of the primitive remedy of killing the

natives, it appeared that the best course was to release the captive

king and get rid of the unprofitable booty by restoring it to him.

In order, however, that the impression made on him by England's

short-sighted disregard of her neighbor's landmark abroad might be

counteracted by a glimpse of the vastness of her armaments and

wealth at home, it was thought advisable to take him first to

London, and show him the wonders of the town. But when the king

arrived, his freedom from English prepossessions made it difficult

to amuse, or even to impress him. A stranger to the idea that a

private man could own a portion of the earth and make others pay him

for permission to live on it, he was unable to understand why such a

prodigiously wealthy nation should be composed partly of poor and

uncomfortable persons toiling incessantly to create riches, and

partly of a class that confiscated and dissipated the wealth thus

produced without seeming to be at all happier than the unfortunate

laborers at whose expense they existed. He was seized with strange

fears, first for his health, for it seemed to him that the air of

London, filthy with smoke, engendered puniness and dishonesty in

those who breathed it; and eventually for his life, when he learned

that kings in Europe were sometimes shot at by passers-by, there

being hardly a monarch there who had not been so imperilled more

than once; that the Queen of England, though accounted the safest of

all, was accustomed to this variety of pistol practice; and that the

autocrat of an empire huge beyond all other European countries,

whose father had been torn asunder in the streets of his capital,

lived surrounded by soldiers who shot down all strangers that

approached him even at his own summons, and was an object of

compassion to the humblest of his servants. Under these

circumstances, the African king was with difficulty induced to stir

out of doors; and he only visited Woolwich Arsenal--the destructive

resources of which were expected to influence his future behavior in

a manner favorable to English supremacy--under compulsion. At last

the Colonial Office, which had charge of him, was at its wit's end

to devise entertainments to keep him in good-humor until the

appointed time for his departure.