Chapter 7

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