 of adventures, so that I might gain renown and be the more
worthy to meet Sir Sagramour when the several years should have rolled away. I
excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three or four years,
yet, to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be ready; all
the chances were that at the end of that time Sir Sagramour would still be out
grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I should then
have been in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery
would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without its working any
harm.
    I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished. In various
quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under
way - nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my
future civilization. In these were gathered together the brightest young minds I
could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time. I
was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts - experts in every sort of
handiwork and scientific calling. These nurseries of mine went smoothly and
privately along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats, for nobody was
allowed to come into their precincts without a special permit - for I was afraid
of the Church.
    I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday schools the first thing;
as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in
those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a
prosperous and growing condition. Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he
wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined public
religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday schools, permitting nothing of
it in my other educational buildings. I could have given my own sect the
preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would
have been to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as
various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions and features,
and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious
garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the
spiritual complexion, angularities and stature of the individual who wears it;
and besides, I was afraid of a united church; it makes a mighty power, the
mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it
is always bound to do, it means death to human
