introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the Earth to bow down to them and worship them.
Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn’t anything you can’t stand, if you are only born and bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too—I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared—at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur’s kingdom. Here I was, a giant among pygmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and only actually great man in that whole British world; and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent from a king’s leman, acquired at secondhand from the slums of London, was a better man than I was. Such a personage was fawned upon in Arthur’s realm and reverently looked up to by everybody, even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base as his lineage. There were times when he could sit down in the king’s presence, but I couldn’t. I could have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised me a large step in everybody’s eyes; even in the king’s, the giver of it. But I didn’t ask for it; and I declined it when it was offered. I couldn’t have enjoyed such a thing with my notions; and it wouldn’t have been fair,