The story ‘Too Dear!’ exposes the predicament of a ruler who is forced to revise his own judgement not out of mercy but out of financial compulsions. The narrator seems to ridicule the foolishness of rulers who make rules unmindful of the real situation in which they are placed.
The story is thus a parody of one of the modern systems of governance. It ridicules the ways of bringing criminals to book and dispensing justice in modern states. Though the story is narrated in a matter of fact tone, there is an undercurrent of sarcasm. Monaco is a tiny kingdom with only seven thousand inhabitants. It has a real kinglet who lives in a palace with courtiers, ministers, a bishop, generals and an army of only sixty men in all. The king lives by collecting taxes on tobacco, wine and spirits and a poll tax. As the revenue collected from the people is too meagre to feed himself and his people, the king permits a gaming house where people play roulette. From the profits of the gaming house, the king gets a large sum of money.
This is the situation in which the king is placed. From this one can infer that, based on the size of the population and the army, the king can only be a toy king or a dummy who in reality cannot control the behaviour of the people except through mutual understanding and ethical principles.
The system of governance is only a make-believe system and it can boomerang or collapse at any point in time. As long as life goes on smoothly, there is no need for the king to prove to the people that he is their ruler and they must obey him. But, it so happens that a crime is committed, and the king being the moral authority has to exercise his authority. Herein lies the crux of the whole story.
The king behaves like a king of a big kingdom in terms of both money and muscle power and announces a death sentence, which cannot be implemented and, instead of punishing the criminal, gives him a pension. This ironical situation is created because of the foolishness of the king. The king ought to have arrived at his final decision about the criminal only after examining the ground reality.
