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. But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings. All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them. Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's challenge struck me. Well, you would never imagine it in the world.
Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands.
The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government. An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual. But as a perishable perfect man must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible. My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom at his command. There it was, as sure a fact and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels.