"He will soon," said the Prince. "I shall be sending him a copy of my book on the day of publication." The King shook his head warningly. Then he smiled, a shy nervous smile. "It would be very awkward," he said slowly, "very awkward indeed, if you happened to come to the throne just now. I really don't know what Brasshay would do. But it's too late for me to begin that sort of thing--far too late now." CHAPTER V CHURCH AND STATE I All this while other swan-songs were in preparation to be forced down other throats (and thence presently to be rejected); forced with that gentle air of persuasion which rears its lying front over all forms of "peaceful picketing." Starvation and stuffing were the two methods to be employed. While the Government was picketing the King with threats of withdrawal from office, and the Labor Party the Government with threats of a national strike, the Government was preparing to picket the Bishops by a process of forcible feeding--a plethora of their own kind be thrust upon them--of their own kind but of a very different persuasion. And now at last the Bishops understood that the doubling of their dioceses was but a device of Machiavellian subtlety for the halving of their temporalities. The Bishops had just opened their holy mouths to protest when the approach of the Jubilee festivities shut them up. The Church of Jingalo was on a tight and established footing, and had to conform to the commercial, conventional, and constitutional requirements of its day; for you cannot, if you are by law established, play fast and loose with those institutions on which a nation bases its prosperity. So even when the Government proposed the creation of demi-mondain bishops, and the setting up of what amounted to a second establishment in the upper chamber of its spiritual spouse, the outward proprieties were still observed, and the sanctities of national interests respected. It is true that the Bishop of Olde, lifting from his bed a burden of ninety years, climbed up into the central pulpit of his diocese to preach a sermon which was ecstatically applauded by all Churchmen, and committed thereafter to the keeping of a carefully selected few. It won for him the affectionate nickname of "Never-say-die" and put his followers into a hole from which they never afterwards emerged. And so the Bishops entered into the loyal silence of the Jubilee truce with a flush of conscious rectitude upon their faces; while behind closed doors the Prime Minister and the Primate Archbishop of Ebury had met to talk business, to drive conditional bargains, and to kill time till such other time as seemed good to them.