BY HAMILTON S. WICKS.

The King of a certain country, whose power was absolute and whose will was despotic, issued an edict that all the laborers of his dominion who were engaged in honorable toil should exchange places with those persons who did no work or were engaged in dishonorable or merely speculative avocations, so that the laboring man should fare sumptuously and the non-laborer poorly. Those who worked up in the sunlight on the tall buildings should sit down in the evening to bountiful banquets and should sleep in fine linen on luxurious couches; while those who crawled below in the bleak valleys between the beetling cliffs of architecture should go to frugal meals and sleep amid the rough surroundings of the abodes of the poor. The monarch reasoned that those who did the world’s work were more deserving of the good things of the world than were the idle or the vicious, however wealthy. He imagined that the world was turned upside down socially and economically, and he proposed to turn it back again by his royal fiat.

Backed by his sword, “which is the badge of temporal power wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,” he apprehended no failure in his plans, which had been worked out in their minutest detail. His army was the largest of any nation, and was to a man devoted to its King. His genius had won many victories and extended the borders of glory. Through his impartial system of promotion men from the ranks had risen to be commanders. The soldiery were well fed, well housed, and well paid. A word, a nod, from their King would set in motion this mighty machine to crush out all opposition. Supplementing the military arm of his government the King had organized the most elaborate system of espionage, so that all secrets were open to him, and no whisperings in the street or the club but were conveyed distinctly to his royal ear by the microphone of his spy system. The press was gagged or inspired; the legislature was composed of fawning sycophants; his judiciary was merely a reflection of the royal will; and Holy Church itself displayed its purple robe and golden bowl but to ornament his processions or to hallow his feasts.

Thus matters stood on the evening of the day this great social revolution was inaugurated. It fell out that a group of honest laborers were descending the elevator that carried the brick and mortar to the twentieth story of a certain downtown sky-scraper. While all of them knew of the edict of their King, none had taken it seriously or imagined for a moment that it would be carried into effect literally. On their arrival at the ground floor, a policeman stationed there stopped them and, motioning to an elegant equipage standing across the way, informed them that it was the King’s command that they should enter it and be driven to one of the avenue clubs which had been assigned for their accommodation. Into it they were thrust, dinner-pails and all. They had scarcely time to recover their equanimity, as they were rapidly whirled through one thoroughfare after another, till the avenue in question was reached and they were deposited in front of a stately brownstone mansion. Their coming had been expected, and the great doors swung open as they alighted, whilst a uniformed lackey motioned them to enter. Their astonishment was redoubled at the splendor of the interior furnishings. Each was assigned a room, where they were bathed and groomed and dressed in garments suitable for their surroundings. Dinner was served by the time they were ready, and into the glittering salle À manger they were duly ushered. A fashionable table d’hÔte was a new sensation to every man of them, and they certainly astonished the table d’hÔte. It (the table d’hÔte) never realized before what it was to be fully appreciated. An evening of cigars, wine, and billiards followed; and then they stretched their tough and sinewy workmen’s legs between the whitest of silken sheets, spread over the springiest of hair mattresses, on the brightest of brass bedsteads. There we leave them to such dreams as their surroundings invited, to turn our attention to four bachelor brokers on the stock exchange, whose apartments at the club our bachelor workingmen were inhabiting.

With as little thought of the reality of the great King’s edict as the workingmen themselves, they were sauntering forth from the exchange at the hour of 3 p. m., when they were pounced upon by a quarter score of stalwart policemen and landed inside a rough luggage conveyance. Baxter Street was a Garden of Eden compared to the slums to which they were driven, and they were finally sheltered in a dirty tenement that arose in a series of rickety stories to a dizzy height. Their fastidious taste would not permit them to indulge in sleep amid such commonplace surroundings, where the only furniture of their room consisted of two dirty beds and a filthy sink. So they sat up all night smoking the cigars they happened to have in their clothes when captured, and muttering deep curses against their eccentric ruler.

The following morning the awakening of the laborers resembled that of Christopher Sly in “The Taming of the Shrew.” They were bewildered with astonishment at the appointments of their surroundings and the service of their attendants. A champagne headache was a natural accompaniment to the previous night’s drinking and gorging; so that fashionable “coffee and rolls,” though served in the most delicate of faÏence, seemed but meagre fare upon which to commence the arduous labors of the day. At precisely 5:30 a. m. the same carriage they had occupied the previous evening, with its crested panels, its liveried coachman, and its spanking span of bays, was at the door to convey them back to work.

The same routine was substantially carried into effect each day, a natural consequence of which was that they became weary of their enforced luxury, and their hearts yearned for the humble living of their tenement, with its rough and hearty jollity, and its freedom from constraint and the supervision of lackeys, however well dressed or polite. In the case of the fastidious brokers kept under surveillance, tired nature at last, reluctant, yielded. There came a day, or rather a night, when even they were able to sleep—an uneasy, troubled sleep, it is true—amid the mean surroundings of the tenement.

The determined will of the monarch so ordered affairs that the conditions under his edict were kept in force for many days. He proposed to give a thorough test to his quixotic ideas. The portion of the workmen was hard manual labor by day in the upper regions of air and light, and by night the relaxation of enervating luxury; and the portion of the brokers was deep dejection, deep curses, and haggard sleeplessness.

The culmination of this condition of unrest occurred at a great ball which another royal edict had blazoned forth to be given as a tribute to the laboring masses, and at which the non-producers would be compelled to assist, not indeed as menials, but as experienced advisers. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at least would be expended on the pomp and glory of the occasion. The sage counsellors of state, men deeply versed in the lore of the past, were called together to devise costumes for the crude working people and to frame rules of etiquette for their behavior. The most elaborate descriptions appeared in the daily press of what was proposed. For weeks the vast preparations went steadily forward. Everything of luxury and ornament that the commerce of the empire sucked up from the farthest confines of the earth was made to minister to the great event.

At last the auspicious day arrived. One of the grandest palaces of the King himself was the scene of the festivity. The costumes worn represented many of the great names of history, from Julius CÆsar to Napoleon Bonaparte, and from Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette. The height of the great occasion was reached somewhat after midnight when the quadrille d’honneur was announced. The great King sat upon a raised dais, or throne, the better to view the gorgeous pageant. A mighty fanfare of trumpets, which seemed to whirl the feelings for a moment into the forces beyond mortality, invited to the initial movements of the quadrille. It was as though an army with banners was about to launch its squadrons upon the foe in some majestic Friedland or Gettysburg. As the sound died away, there was a pause. The great King looked up in amazement, and stamping that foot whose heel had rested upon the necks of mighty potentates, now his willing vassals, he arose with frown black as midnight.

Suffer me, O reader, to recall the elements of this unparalleled occasion: On the one hand, almost omnipotent power, backed by transcendent though wayward genius, a will that hitherto had never been balked, an unsullied prestige, a front of Jove to threaten and command, upon which great thought registered every varying expression, one of the least of which would have endowed an ordinary prince with lasting renown. On the other hand, “fantastic compliment strutting up and down tricked in outlandish feather.” A motion from the hand of majesty, now fully erect, sent another mighty wave of martial music flying on invisible wings, in thousand forms, throughout every corridor. As this second summons for the masterpiece to be set in motion died away in turn, two bands of men detached themselves from the distant throng massed in the farthest background, and came slowly forward with bowed heads and deferential tread. At the same instant a hundred brilliant officers of the household stepped out of the corridors behind the King with drawn swords, and other hundreds crowded behind them prepared to do their master’s instant service.

The Great Strategist comprehended the situation with a single sweeping glance of his eagle eye, and drawing himself up full height motioned his servitors with his left hand back into their concealment, while with his extended right hand he encouraged with benignant gesture the approach of the representatives of the people, who had shrunk back in dismay when the King’s guard sprang forth so abruptly. It was now seen that the approaching bands were composed in equal parts of the gaudily caparisoned workmen and their plainly dressed advisers. Each party bore in its midst an enormous roll, whose weight impeded anything like rapid progress. On arriving at the front of the throne, they deposited their burdens and then prostrated themselves before the King. When bidden to arise and state their purpose, a stalwart son of toil stepped forward in front of his comrades. He was attired in a $10,000 costume, representing Henry of Navarre. This costume sat upon his rugged limbs as though they had been melted into it. The King gazed complacently upon his manufactured nobleman and bade him proceed.

“August and Sovereign King!” thus began the blacksmith, for such he was when not intoxicated or attending a costume ball—“August and Sovereign King, I have been pushed forward by my fellows who have joined in this petition, with a vast multitude of their co-workers, similarly gorged with hateful luxury. They ask me to state plainly to your Majesty that they now know from actual experience how hollow and worthless are all the glories of the merely rich, whose time is devoted to vain shows and in devising new delicacies for the palate. They beseech your Majesty that you, in accordance with your gracious pleasure, should restore them to their simple and humble paths of life, wherein they will dwell in reasonable contentment hereafter.”

The workman ceased, and the spokesman for wealth and idleness stepped forward and pleaded his case very eloquently. He showed, in the petition which many thousands of his class had signed, that through their recent experience they all had been made to feel the weight of life as it rests upon those under them. He averred that he and his fellows were heartily sick of their lives thus ordered, and that they petitioned the King to send them beyond his confines, or place them in his army, or, better still, allow them to seek honorable employment in vocations more in accord with their taste and inclination.

The King, esteeming that he had sufficiently disciplined the wealthy and had measurably cast out the “daimon of unrest” from the mind of labor, while at the same time he had given a notable illustration to all his people of the folly of outrunning too far the sentiments of your age, and the arrant rot of placing edicts upon the statute books that at once become a dead letter unless backed by despotic force, and feeling the security of his position, stood before his petitioners, lightly leaning on his left foot, with his right hand in the breast of his coat, and thus addressed them: