"You flatter me. But I would rather have your advice, if that is what you call 'dictating.' I am not exactly a fool, but then, I am not very wise either."
"No one is very wise, and we are all fools compared to some people," said Mr. Bellingham. "If anybody wanted a figurehead for a new Ship of Fools, I sometimes think a portrait of myself would be singularly appropriate. There are times when I should fix upon a friend for the purpose. Mermaid--half fish--figurehead, half man, half fool. That's a very good idea."
"Very good--for the friend. Meanwhile, you know, it is I who am going on the errand. If you do not make it clear to me it will be a fool's errand."
"It is perfectly clear, my dear sir," insisted Mr. Bellingham. "You go to St. Petersburg; you get an audience--you can do that by means of the letters; you lay the matter before the Czar, and request justice. Either you get it or you do not. That is the beauty of an autocratic country."
"How about a free country?" asked Claudius.
"You don't get it," replied his host grimly. Claudius laughed a cloud of smoke into the air.
"Why is that?" he asked idly, hoping to launch Mr. Bellingham into further aphorisms and paradoxes.
"Men are everywhere born free, but they--"
"Oh," said Claudius, "I want to know your own opinion about it."
"I have no opinion; I only have experience," answered the other. "At any rate in an autocratic country there is a visible, tangible repository of power to whom you can apply. If the repository is in the humour you will get whatever you want done, in the way of justice or injustice. Now in a free country justice is absorbed into the great cosmic forces, and it is apt to be an expensive incantation that wakes the lost elementary spirit. In Russia justice shines by contrast with the surrounding corruption, but there is no mistake about it when you get it. In America it is taken for granted everywhere, and the consequence is that, like most things that are taken for granted, it is a myth. Rousseau thought that in a republic like ours there would be no more of the 'chains' he was so fond of talking about. He did not anticipate a stagnation of the national moral sense. An Englishman who has made a study of these things said lately that the Americans had retained the forms of freedom, but that the substance had suffered considerably."