Page:Civil and Religious Liberty (Annie Besant).pdf/9

 Clubs; yet our rulers never dream that the people are discontented, and that these clubs are signs of the times. They fancy that the agitation is only the work of the few, and that there is no widely-spread disaffection behind the Republican teachers; only the leaders of popular movements know the vast force which they can wield in case of need, but the Government will never listen to these men, any more than in France they would listen to Mirabeau, until it was too late. Yet do sensible people think that a sound and a healthy society can rest upon the misery of the masses? and do our rulers think that palaces stand firm when they are built up upon such hovels as those which I have described? It appears they do; for our Queen and our Princes seem to believe in the lip-loyalty of the crowds which cheer them when they make us happy by driving through our streets, loyalty that springs from the thoughtlessness of custom, and not from true and manly reverence for real worth. For I would not be thought to disparage the sentiment of loyalty; I hold it to be one of the fairest blossoms which flower on the emotional side of the nature of man. Loyalty to principle, loyalty to a great cause, loyalty to some true leader, crowned king of men by reason of his virtue, of his genius, of his strength—such loyalty as this it is no shame for a freeman to yield, such loyalty as this has, in all ages of the world, inspired men to the noblest self-devotion, nerved men to the most heroic self-sacrifice. But just as only those things which are valuable in themselves are thought worthy of imitation in baser metal, so is this true golden loyalty imitated by the pinchbeck loyalty, which shouts in our streets. For what true loyalty is possible from us towards the House of Brunswick? Loyalty to virtue? as enshrined in a Prince of Wales? loyalty to liberality, and to delicacy of sentiment? as exemplified by a Duke of Edinburgh? loyalty to any great cause, whose success in this generation is bound up with the life of any member of our Royal House? The very questions send a ripple of laughter through any assemblage of Englishmen, and they are beginning to feel, at last, that true loyalty can only be paid to some man who stands head and shoulders above his fellows, and not to some poor dwarf, whom we can only see over the heads of the crowd, because he stands on the artificial elevation of a throne.

The court in France was very extravagant; it spent