ep 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; also on imports. And they wanted to issue bonds; also paper
money, redeemable in yams and cabbages in fifty years. They said the pay
of the army and of the navy and of the whole governmental machine was
far in arrears, and unless something was done, and done immediately,
national bankruptcy must ensue, and possibly insurrection and
revolution. The emperor at once resolved upon a high-handed measure, and
one of a nature never before heard of in Pitcairn's Island. He went in
state to the church on Sunday morning, with the army at his back, and
commanded the minister of the treasury to take up a collection.

That was the feather that broke the camel's back. First one citizen, and
then another, rose and refused to submit to this unheard-of outrage--and
each refusal was followed by the immediate confiscation of the
malcontent's property. This vigor soon stopped the refusals, and the
collection proceeded amid a sullen and ominous silence. As the emperor
withdrew with the troops, he said, "I will teach you who is master
here." Several persons shouted, "Down with unification!" They were at
once arrested and torn from the arms of their weeping friends by the
soldiery.

But in the mean time, as any prophet might have foreseen, a Social
Democrat had been developed. As the emperor stepped into the gilded
imperial wheelbarrow at the church door, the social democrat stabbed at
him fifteen or sixteen times with a harpoon, but fortunately with such a
peculiarly social democratic unprecision of aim as to do no damage.

That very night the convulsion came. The nation rose as one man--though
forty-nine of the revolutionists were of the other sex. The infantry
threw down their pitchforks; the artillery cast aside their cocoa-nuts;
the navy revolted; the emperor was seized, and bound hand and foot in
his palace. He was very much depressed. He said:--

"I freed you from a grinding tyranny; I lifted you up out of your
degradation, and made you a nation among nations; I gave you a strong,
compact, centralized governme