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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily
knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him.
So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch
who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.
I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely
into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain
standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless
to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance,
might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would
have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will
easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority,
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