There was a table in the square on Thursday, between the seed merchant and the man who sharpens things, and behind it were two young people from somewhere north with a clipboard and a photograph and a request that I sign a petition about a ridge.
I had not heard of the ridge. I want that on the record at the start, because this column is going to be about the fact that I had not heard of the ridge, and I would rather admit it than have it discovered.
The photograph was, I will grant them, very fine. A river valley in evening light, the whole floor of it gone the colour of a match head, and above it a granite shelf where — the young woman told me, and she was not performing, she meant it — people from her State have gone to propose marriage for about ninety years. They call it Riverglow. The survey calls it Argent Ridge. The Assembly voted 271 to 194 to convey the development rights over it and almost nobody noticed until a photographer stood on the boundary line and took that picture.
They were at the table for four hours. They got, by my count from the window, nine signatures. One of them was the man who sharpens things, who signs everything.
Now. I am not going to write the column you think I am going to write. I am not going to be the crusty provincial editor who tells two earnest young people to take their beautiful hillside and go home, because I have read the provision and the joke is not on them. It is on me.
Here is why they came to Dorven.
To repeal a law by petition, §13.1 requires signatures in at least one-third of all States and Territories. Not one-third of the people. One-third of the jurisdictions. And the Territory of Orath, population one hundred and forty thousand, most of whom are asleep by nine, is a jurisdiction. We count exactly as much as Varek does. We count exactly as much as Aldenmere does, and there are more people in Verentum's third district than there are in this entire Territory.
They did not come to Dorven because they thought we would care about the ridge. They came because we count, and they cannot get there without us, and no amount of fury in the north can substitute for nine signatures next to a seed merchant on a Thursday.
I have spent eleven years in this chair complaining that nobody in Verentum knows this Territory exists. Thursday, two people drove four hundred miles to stand in our square in the wind because the Constitution says they cannot do the thing they want to do without asking us first.
I am not sure I have ever seen the arithmetic work in our favour before. I am not sure I liked it as much as I expected to.
Because here is the other half, and it is the half that has kept me at this desk longer than the column needed.
Those nine signatures are not nine opinions about a ridge. Not one of the nine has seen it. They signed because a polite young woman asked them to, and because the photograph was pretty, and because the man who sharpens things signs everything. If the north gets its threshold in Orath, it will be because a hundred and forty thousand people who have no view whatever on the upper Toren watershed were sufficiently well-mannered on a market day.
Is that democracy? I have been turning it over since Thursday and I have not got to the bottom of it.
The argument for it is that the framers were making a point, and the point was that a national instrument should require a national reach. If you want to overturn an Act of the Assembly, you should have to go and stand in a cold square in a place you have never been and explain yourself to people who owe you nothing. That is a real bar and it is meant to be. It stops one furious region from working the machinery of the whole Republic.
The argument against it is sitting in my square looking at nine signatures after four hours, and it is this: the bar does not measure whether the country agrees with you. It measures whether you can afford the petrol.
I do not know which of those is right. I suspect both are, which is the usual answer and never a satisfying one.
What I do know is that they have eight months for that phase, and then eight more for a national threshold I would not want to try for, and the Act stays law the entire time. I asked the young woman whether she knew that — whether she knew the bulldozers do not stop while she stands in squares. She said yes. She said it the way you say a thing you have already had the argument about with yourself and lost.
Then she asked if she could put the table back up next market day.
I said yes. Obviously I said yes. It is a public square, and she has driven four hundred miles, and whatever else I think about all this, the Constitution of this Republic says that a woman from Varek must come to Dorven and ask — and there is not much of the machinery of state that has ever been obliged to come here and ask us for anything.
The seed is in. The rate is still where it was. Nine signatures.
She will be back Thursday.