In earlier chapters, the knights have been seen as innocent and delightful children playing games and enjoying life. Now, however, when The Boss puts them between advertising sandwich-boards, they become truly ridiculous. The signs that the knights carry introduce another modern concept—advertising. This particular knight is advertising soap, and the advertising campaign is going so successfully that the workers in The Boss's soap factories are being overworked. Were we to be logical—a fallacy in reading a book such as this—we would have to point out that the advertising campaign could not work since no one except the clergy could read, thereby rendering the campaign unsuccessful. In fact, on this particular point, in Chapter 25 ("The Competitive Examination"), the young men who have been born of royal birth consider it an insult to be asked if they can read or write—that is a trivial task reserved for lowly clerks, and nobility should not be bothered by such trivia.
The entire idea of introducing both soap and advertising was done with the "several wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of his nation." The irony here, as elsewhere, is that The Boss views civilization only in terms of material progress. This is one of the reasons that Twain refers to him as an "ignoramus."
In his meeting with Morgan le Fay, The Boss is again exposed to contradictory reactions in the same person. He has heard that she hates her brother, King Arthur, and that she is a vicious sorceress. Yet when he meets her, he is charmed by her "manner of pretty graces and graciousness." But when a page slips and falls upon her, she kills him with a dagger without a blink of an eye. From this act of atrocity, she immediately goes to her prayers. The Boss is mystified by this course of events, but he realizes that the Church has such a hold on the people that while the aristocracy can kill commoners at will, they must obey the call of the Church, which has the power to forgive them for their actions.
In Chapter 17, Twain is having some more of his good-natured fun. The Boss, after having freed the old grandmother, feels that Morgan le Fay needs someone to murder, so The Boss gives her permission to hang the band leader, the composer, and the entire band because they played so badly the night before.
This is The Boss being arbitrarily cruel, and this is Mark Twain suggesting that bad artists who impose their bad art upon the public should be strung up; interestingly, later in the novel, when the press is prepared to publish books, Sir Dinadan publishes a book of his jokes, which is so bad that The Boss has him hanged because of the bad jokes.
In Chapter 18, Twain strikes out against the Church. Once The Boss is in total control, he will try to abolish the established Church—"my idea is to have it [religion] cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty." In this regard, one should note that many great writers and thinkers have seen a strong centralized church as being more of a political force than a spiritual force. Significantly, later in the novel, the Church does assert its political strength, and it proves to be more effective than The Boss's scientific realism.
Also in Chapter 18, Twain reiterates an idea that was the basis of an earlier novel, The Prince and the Pauper. In that novel, the prince and the pauper exchange clothes and no one can tell which is the prince and which is the pauper—except by the clothes which they wear. In this chapter, a man was imprisoned for saying that he believed that "if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk." Later on, we will see a verification of this idea when the king dresses as a peasant and goes unrecognized among his people.
