Now straightway imperial reforms began. Orders of nobility were
instituted. A minister of the navy was appointed, and the whale-boat put
in commission. A minister of war was created, and ordered to proceed at
once with the formation of a standing army. A first lord of the treasury
was named, and commanded to get up a taxation scheme, and also open
negotiations for treaties, offensive, defensive, and commercial, with
foreign powers. Some generals and admirals were appointed; also some
chamberlains, some equerries in waiting, and some lords of the
bedchamber.
At this point all the material was used up. The Grand Duke of Galilee,
minister of war, complained that all the sixteen grown men in the empire
had been given great offices, and consequently would not consent to serve
in the ranks; wherefore his standing army was at a standstill. The
Marquis of Ararat, minister of the navy, made a similar complaint. He
said he was willing to steer the whale-boat himself, but he must have
somebody to man her.
The emperor did the best he could in the circumstances: he took all the
boys above the age of ten years away from their mothers, and pressed them
into the army, thus constructing a corps of seventeen privates, officered
by one lieutenant-general and two major-generals. This pleased the
minister of war, but procured the enmity of all the mothers in the land;
for they said their precious ones must now find bloody graves in the
fields of war, and he would be answerable for it. Some of the more
heartbroken and unappeasable among them lay constantly wait for the
emperor and threw yams at him, unmindful of the body-guard.
On account of the extreme scarcity of material, it was found necessary to
require the Duke of Bethany postmaster-general, to pull stroke-oar in the
navy and thus sit in the rear of a noble of lower degree namely, Viscount
Canaan, lord justice of the common pleas. This turned the Duke of
Bethany into tolerably open malcontent and a secret conspirator–a thing
which the emperor foresaw, but could not help.
Things went from bad to worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the
peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for
reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry
Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused
trouble in a powerful quarter–the church. The new empress secured the
support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in the
nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this made
deadly enemies of the remaining twelve. The families of the maids of
honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep
house. The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen as
servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and other
great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform other
menial and equally distasteful services. This made bad blood in that
department.
Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support of
the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were
intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary. The
emperor’s reply–“Look–Look at Germany; look at Italy. Are you better
than they? and haven’t you unification?”—did not satisfy them. They
said, “People can’t eat unification, and we are starving. Agriculture
has ceased. Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,
everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with
nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields–”
“Look at Germany; look at Italy. It is the same there. Such is
unification, and there’s no other way to get it–no other way to keep it
after you’ve got it,” said the poor emperor always.
But the grumblers only replied, “We can’t stand the taxes–we can’t stand
them.”
Now right on top of this the cabinet reported a national debt amounting
to upward of forty-five dollars–half a dollar to every individual in the
nation. And they proposed to fund something. They had heard that this
was always done in such emergencies. They proposed duties on exports;