The Keepers of the People

EXPEDIENT

The most important word in the novel and the one a modern reader will most certainly get wrong. In present usage expedient means advantageous rather than right — an expedient is what you do instead of the proper thing. In 1898 it still carried its older and far stronger sense: conducive to the end in view, and, in the technical vocabulary of English moral philosophy after Bentham and Mill, productive of the greatest good. When Prince Ralph says of a killing "It is expedient," he is not conceding that it is regrettable but convenient. He is claiming that it is right, on the only ground he admits.

Jepson knew where the sentence came from. "It is expedient that one man die for the people" is Caiaphas's, at John xi. 50, spoken in the council that resolves on the death of Christ, and in the Gospel it is the standing example of the reasoning that destroys God. In The Keepers of the People it is the opening line of the dynasty's scripture, a household proverb among the Varandals, the answer to every objection anyone raises in three hundred pages, and finally a liturgical response which a village makes aloud at the execution of one of its own sons (II.viii). Count the occurrences as they go by: the word is the novel's spine, and the places where it is not used — the chapters about Althea — are as deliberate as the places where it is.

THE PEOPLE

Always singular, always collective, and never once a synonym for the persons who compose it. "The people" in this novel is a made object with a history, a character, a health and a mortal interest of its own, and it is the only thing in the book that has rights. Individuals do not; they are the material out of which it is made, and the novel says so without embarrassment — "we have all of us laboured so hard and so long" to build it, and six thousand of its members are to be killed in a war arranged for the purpose because "the people grow too thick on the ground" (II.xi).