The Apple Cart

prodigal, sir, has returned to his father’s house. Not poor, not hungry, not ragged, as of old. Oh no. This time he returns bringing with him the riches of the earth to the ancestral home. Magnus Starting from his chair. You don’t mean to say⁠— Vanhattan Rising also, blandly triumphant. I do, sir. The Declaration of Independence is cancelled. The treaties which endorsed it are torn up. We have decided to rejoin the British Empire. We shall of course enjoy Dominion Home Rule under the Presidency of Mr. Bossfield. I shall revisit you here shortly, not as the Ambassador of a foreign power, but as High Commissioner for the greatest of your dominions, and your very loyal and devoted subject, sir. Magnus Collapsing into his chair. The devil you will! He stares haggardly into futurity, now for the first time utterly at a loss. The Queen What a splendid thing, Mr. Vanhattan! Vanhattan I thought your Majesty would say so. The most splendid thing that has ever happened. He resumes his seat. The Queen Looking anxiously at the King. Don’t you think so, Magnus? Magnus Pulling himself together with a visible effort. May I ask, Mr. Vanhattan, with whom did this⁠—this⁠—this masterstroke of American policy originate? Frankly, I have been accustomed to regard your President as a statesman whose mouth was the most efficient part of his head. He cannot have thought of this himself. Who suggested it to him? Vanhattan I must accept your criticism of Mr. Bossfield with all doo reserve, but I may mention that we Americans will probably connect the good news with the recent visit to our shores of the President of the Irish Free State. I cannot pronounce his name in its official Gaelic form; and there is only one typist in our bureau who can spell it; but he is known to his friends as Mick O’Rafferty. Magnus The rascal! Jemima: we shall have to live in Dublin. This is the end of England. Vanhattan In a sense that may be so. But England will not perish. She will merge⁠—merge, sir⁠—into a bigger and brighter concern. Perhaps I should have mentioned that one of our conditions will be that you shall be Emperor. King may be good enough for this little island; but if we come in we shall require something grander. Magnus This little island! “This little gem set in a silver sea!” Has it occurred to you, Mr. Vanhattan, that rather than be reduced to a mere appendage of a big American concern, we might raise the old warcry of Sinn Fein, and fight for our independence to the last drop of our blood? Vanhattan I should be right sorry to contemplate such a reversion to a barbarous past. Fortunately, it’s impossible⁠—immpawsibl. The old warcry would not appeal to the cosmopolitan crews of the fleet of the League of Nations in the Atlantic. That fleet would blockade you, sir. And I fear we should be obliged to boycott you. The two thousand million dollars a year would stop. Magnus But the continental Powers! Do you suppose they would consent for a moment to such a change in the balance of power? Vanhattan Why not? The change would be only nominal. Magnus Nominal! You call an amalgamation of the British Commonwealth with the United States a nominal change! What will France and Germany call it? Vanhattan Shaking his head indulgently. France and Germany? These queer old geographical expressions which you use here from old family habit do not trouble us. I suppose you mean by Germany the chain of more or less Soviet Republics between the Ural Mountains and the North Sea. Well, the clever people at Moscow and Berlin and Geneva are trying to federate them; and it is fully understood between us that if we don’t object to their move they will not object to ours. France, by which I take it you mean the Government at New Timgad, is too busy in Africa to fuss about what is happening at the ends of your little Channel Tube. So long as Paris is full of Americans, and Americans are full of money, all’s well in the west from the French point of view. One of the great attractions of Paris for Americans is the excursion to Old England. The French want us to feel at home here. And so we do. Why shouldn’t we? After all, we are at home here. Magnus In what sense, may I ask? Vanhattan Well, we find here everything we are accustomed to: our industrial products, our books, our plays, our sports, our Christian Science churches, our osteopaths, our movies and talkies. Put it in a small parcel and say our goods and our ideas. A political union with us will be just the official recognition of an already accomplished fact. A union of hearts, you might call it. The Queen You forget, Mr. Vanhattan. We have a great national tradition. Vanhattan The United States, ma’am, have absorbed all the great national traditions, and blended them with their own glorious tradition of Freedom into something that is unique and universal. The Queen We have a civilized culture which is peculiar to ourselves. It may not be better than yours; but it is different. Vanhattan Well, is it? We found that culture enshrined in British material works of art: in the stately country homes of your nobility, in the cathedrals our common forefathers built as the country houses of God. What did you do with them? You sold them to us. I was brought up in the shade of Ely cathedral, the removal of which from the county of Cambridge to New Jersey was my dear old father’s first big professional job. The building which stands on its former site is a very fine one: in my opinion the best example of reinforced concrete of its period; but it was designed by an American architect, and built by the Synthetic Building Materials Trust, an international affair. Believe me, the English people, the real English people who take things as