I
Heraldry dies hard. It is of purely savage origin, having its roots in
the ancient necessity of tribal classification. Before our ancestors
had a written language their tribes and families found it convenient
to distinguish themselves from one another by rude pictures of such
objects as they knew about, with improvements by the artist of the
period—the six-legged lion, the two-headed eagle, the spear-point lily
and the thistle-with-a-difference. The modifications were infinite;
accessories developed into essentials and the science of heraldry was
evolved, to explain what the pictures were and expound their meaning.
Like the priests and the medicine men of all times, and the lawyers
and all other professionals of our time, heralds were swift to discern
a profit in complicating their fad with an unthinkable multitude of
invented additions and technical shibboleths intelligible to nobody
but themselves; and to-day, when the entire scheme has long ceased
to have any practical relation to the lives of men and the polity of
nations, there are in Europe high officers of government charged with
the duty of its exposition and conservation, and with the custody of
its ludicrous muniments and paraphernalia. And men and women accounted
intelligent and modest are proud of devices owing their origin to
barbarism, their signification to the thrifty ingenuity of drones and
leeches and their perpetuation to the same naked and unashamed vanity
as that of men who decorate their breasts with “orders” and “crosses”
certifying their personal merit.
Where these things exist as “survivals” their use is at least a
supportable stupidity; but in America, where they come by cold-blooded
adoption essentially simian, they are offensive. Many of the devices
upon the seals of our states are no less ridiculous than those used
(or the use of any) by some of our “genteel” families to hint at an
illustrious descent. Our national coat-of-arms itself is almost enough
to make a self-respecting American forswear his allegiance. From a
shield with an eagle on it we have developed an eagle with a shield
on it. We may call it the American eagle, but it is the same old bird
that tore the heart out of Gaul and the gall out of Carthage; the
same that has whetted his bloody beak upon the bones of a thousand
tribes now extinct; the same that was fearfully and wonderfully drawn
in berry-juice upon rocks to glad the vanity of the shock-headed
cave-dweller when the browsing mammoth was flushed with rose in the
dawning of time.