that choose the President, but God gave us
the King.” Nothing could be opposed to
a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest
faith the humble worshipper could not well be told
that the picture or the statue of his adoration was
not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going too
far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say
that loyalty with the English is a sort of religious
principle. What is with us more or less a joke,
sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance
to the powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate,
is with them a most serious thing, at which no man
may smile without loss.
I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that
I darkled most respectfully about it, without the
courage to inquire directly into the mystery.
If it was often on my tongue to ask, “What is
loyalty? How did you come by it? Why are
you loyal?”—I felt that it would
be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and
I should vainly plead in excuse that this property
of theirs mystified me the more because it seemed absolutely
left out of the American nature. I perceived
that in the English it was not less really present
because it was mixed, or used to be mixed, with scandal
that the alien can do no more than hint at. That
sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now
to censure the King, or any of the Royal Family, it
would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite unfair,
since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism.
Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though
in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must
all the while be smiling at the notion of anything
sacred in the Sovereign.
[Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT]
II
Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is
a convention to which the alien will tacitly conform
in the measure of his good taste or his good sense.
It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a
most curious and interesting spectacle; but it is
not more remarkable, perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence
in the aristocratic forms of society which hedge the
King with their divinity. We think that family
counts for much with ourselves, in New England or
in Virginia; but it counts for nothing at all in comparison
with the face value at which it is current in England.
We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we
are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some
such measure as the commoners of England are subject
to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very
rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his
more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing;
he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful example
of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his
methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman
is, the greater his honor. The American mother
who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke,
cannot even imagine an English duke—say,
Copyrights
Seven English Cities from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
