I
An American writer holds this opinion:
“If republican government had done nothing else than give independence
to American character and preserve it from the servility inseparable
from allegiance to kings, it would have accomplished a great work.”
I do not doubt that the writer of that sentence believes that
republican government has actually wrought the change in human nature
that challenges his admiration. He is sure that his countrymen are not
servile; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered,
maintaining “the godlike attitude of freedom and a man” and exulting in
it. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. We
are as abject toadies as any people on earth—more so than any European
people of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince or
nobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in his
honor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land.
In his blind and brutal scramble for social recognition in Europe, the
traveling American toady and impostor has many chances of success: he
is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls of his own country,
and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur the risk of erring
on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and push him in
where, his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated with
kindly toleration and sometimes a genuine hospitality to which he has
no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he
would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in
mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his
rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower
and fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of
vilification. In the character of blatant blackguard the American snob
is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.
An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the
irreverent Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially
as “The Old Lady.” But the editor in question did not so designate
her—his simple American manhood and republican spirit would not admit
that she was a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait
“Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.” This incident raises an
important question.
Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a
subject and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey?—to own the sway of a
“gory tyrant” and retain one’s self-respect, or dwell, a “sovereign
elector,” in the land of liberty and disgrace it?
However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate the
British sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in
designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would
not say “his Abracadabral Humptidumptiness Emperor William,” nor “his
Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives.”
They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled
American sovereign elector “his Badgesty.” Of a foreign nobleman they
do not say “his lordship;” they will not admit that he is a lord;
nor when speaking of their own noblemen do they spell “lord” with a
capital L, as we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries,
of whatever rank in their own countries, the English press is simply
and serviceably descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the
jack a jack.
At the foundation of our political system lies the denial of hereditary
and artificial rank. Our fathers created this government as a protest
against all that, and all that it implies. They virtually declared that
kings and noblemen could not breathe here, and no American loyal to the
principles of the Revolution which made him one will ever say in his
own country “your majesty” or “your lordship”—the words would choke
him, and they ought.
There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee
to Baäl, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of
political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty
are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that “illimited inane”
where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in
the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the
man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the
bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself a member
in good standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to
the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in
constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn
nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in
practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in
the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom
they are too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils
besetting monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn;
that inequality of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as
conspicuous among us as elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is
as intolerable and that of the public more so; that the law’s majesty
is a dream and its failure a fact—hearing everywhere the footfalls of
disorder and the watchwords of anarchy, I despair of the republic, and
catch in every breeze that blows “a cry prophetic of its fall.”
I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of
waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty
foreign princess as in her own country she had never received. I
have seen full-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and
go speechless when spoken to by an Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a
half-dozen American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one
another in the profundity of their bows in the presence of a nigger
King of Hawaii. I have not seen a Chinese “earl” borne in a chair
by four Americans officially detailed for the disgraceful service,
but it was done, and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did
not—thank Heaven!—observe the mob of American “simple republicans” that
dogged the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by
courtesy only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his
own business of making a living by being a married man. The republican
New World is no less impested with servility than the monarchical Old.
One form of government may be better than another for this purpose,
or for that; all are alike in the futility of their influence upon
human character. None can affect man’s instinctive abasement in the
contemplation of power and rank.
Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchical
countries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages,
and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet of our
own idols—which _they_ do not revere. The typical subject, hat-in-hand
to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure than
the citizen executing his genuflexion before the public of which he
is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier,
was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the
American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the
people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose.
They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their
method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a
testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power.
If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have the
same attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition
for their favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice
of God. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy
is the only natural and rational form of government. And for my part
I’m not at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political
system, as political systems go. I have always, however, cherished
a secret faith in Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages
of both the monarchical and the republican idea. If all the offices
were held for life by Smiths—the senior John being President—we should
have a settled and orderly succession to allay all fears of a perilous
interregnum and a sufficiently wide eligibility to feed the fires of
patriotic ambition. All could not be Smiths, but many could marry into
the family.