The Keepers of the People

First, that the sole test of a government is whether the people are happy, and that happiness has an audible sign. The sign is laughter. It is not a metaphor and Jepson does not let it soften into one. When the Princess Agnes demands to be sent among the Varandal women with her message, Prince Ralph takes her out at evening instead and rides her slowly through six villages, and what she is shown is not prosperity or order but the sound: "the old men laughed with the old women, the wives with the husbands, the young men with the maidens, and the shriller laughter of children heightened everywhere the note" (II.iv). She comes back unshaken, and says that theirs is the happiness of children. "There is no other," he answers. The last page of the novel is Prince Ralph alone on the tower listening to the country: "All Varandaleel laughs at least to-night."

Second, that happiness so defined is incompatible with the things liberal England held to be goods in themselves. Reading and writing, in Varandaleel, "were inexpedient; and were abolished" (I.v) — abolished along with the priesthood, in the same massacre, as one measure. There is no press, no suffrage, no assembly, no school, and no missionary who has been allowed to live. Each of these is refused not because it would threaten the Princes, which it would, but because the novel insists it would make the people unhappy; and the novel takes care to show what it looks like when a little of each gets in. The one village that acquires a political idea — "that the land was their own, and they would not pay the tithes" — is destroyed (II.vi). The one missionary who is allowed into the country turns out, on examination, to grudge the Varandals their laughter, and is put to death for it (II.xvi).

Third, that a people is a made thing. This is the heart of the book and it is set out in a single chapter, The History of Varandaleel (II.iii), which steps out of the story for twenty pages to give the dynasty's whole record. Jepson's word for what the Princes do is not rule but keep, and build: the first Prince "was fired with the ambition to build a people," walled the valley, massacred the priests, worked "with the pitiless insensibility to human suffering of an idealist," imported wheat, the olive and the vine, and carried off Kafiristani women by the hundred "to breed him children of a harder strain." The obligation runs to the people as a whole. It does not run to any member of it, and cannot, because members are the material.