The Keepers of the People

The first is the racial and eugenic language, which is not a stray Victorian reflex but load-bearing. Ralph comes to England to marry because "we think it right to keep the English strain pure" (I.ii). The dynasty's method of improving its subjects is the annual raid and the carried-off bride. When a village goes mad and performs a human sacrifice, the explanation offered is that the district was settled by the black soldiers the second Prince brought with him, and "that African taint broke out in an African savagery" (II.ix). When six hundred Russian prisoners are to be disposed of, the humane case for killing them is put by the English doctor, who has found the bulk of them diseased and is "thinking of the unborn children" (II.xiv). These passages are not asides; they are the argument doing its work. An edition that let a reader admire the political case without stopping at them would be doing the reader a disservice.

The second is the disposal of the women. Every woman in the book is disposed of by a man. Agnes Freshington is married for her health and her brains, told plainly that she will not rule, and — when the old Prince wants a grandson — condemned in a single sentence over the wine: "The woman must die" (II.xvi). Vashti, the Mistress of the Mutes, is bargained for between two men and given away; she is the old Prince's best-beloved child and she cannot say either yes or no aloud. Latchimi is bought for a bag of gold at a spring, kept in a walled garden, and knows from the first minute what the end will be. Ruth's marriage is annulled by a court she is summoned to without being told why and in which she is asked four questions and given no choice; the Princes decide beforehand, explicitly, that "it would spare her feelings, if she were given no choice in the matter" (II.xviii).

And then the book does something its argument did not require. It gives the last chapter to Althea. She has been trained for eleven chapters into exactly the thing the Princes wanted — a helper, hard, useful, able to suggest hemlock for six hundred men and mean it kindly — and at the end she discovers she is in love, challenges her dearest friend to a duel over it at ten paces, raises the pistol, looks at Ruth's face, cannot fire, and drops to the ground crying "I am only a wretched woman after all!" Prince Ralph, arriving, proposes the obvious Varandal solution, that he is big enough for both of them. Althea says the matter is Ruth's to settle. And Ruth — who has just won everything — refuses to settle it: