The Keepers of the People

The construction has a grammar and Jepson holds to it. Nobody in Varandaleel is ever called a citizen, a subject enjoying rights, or a man with a claim. The Varandals are "the people," and when one of them is to be destroyed he becomes "one man," a unit set against the whole. The entire moral argument of the book lives in the gap between the two nouns, and a reader who slides over it will find the Princes merely brutal rather than what Jepson intends them to be, which is consistent.

LAUGHTER

The novel's measure of good government, and meant literally. Not contentment, not prosperity, not the utilitarian's aggregate of satisfactions, but an audible noise which a ruler can ride out at night and hear for himself. It is offered as evidence because it cannot be faked at scale, and Jepson accordingly stages the evidence three times: the ride through the villages in II.iv, the silence that falls over the country during the invasion in II.xii, and the last paragraph of the book, in which Prince Ralph climbs the tower at his own wedding-feast to listen and says, "All Varandaleel laughs at least to-night."

The word runs the other way as well. The Princes have bought this laughter at the price of their own — "as he had told Lady Lisdor, the Princes had bought laughter for the Varandals at the price of their own" (II.v) — and in the whole palace only two people laugh: Althea, who is a child, and Latchimi, who is a hill-girl in a walled garden. Both of them stop before the book ends. Whether the reader accepts the standard or not, it is worth noticing how rigorously Jepson applies it: the one charge on which he condemns the missionary to death is that he grudges the Varandals their laughter.