What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs, whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand. Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been on a public platform. There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto him who dares to approach such a potentate pro tem without visible manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human being. But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse. They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable mercies of the neighbors.