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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: 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,
that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days.
He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked
deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential
spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think
pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show,
in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling
foreign princes. But then, people in one's own grade of life
are not usually embarrassing objects.
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