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102 vanish entirely if he were to attempt to play the role in earnest. But how can the members of Parliament in a sham limited monarchy consent to make themselves ridiculous by speeches without effect, gestures without purposes and votes without results? This is what we cannot understand. Neither the undisguised contempt of the prime minister nor the calumnies of the press subsidized by the Government, deter them from their task. Can it be that they are sustained by a secret hope that some day the Parliament may become in reality what it now only appears to be? But such a hope or desire is impossible to any one who accepts and believes the fiction of the divine origin of the monarchy.

To any one who despises and condemns the conventional lies and liars of our modern civilization, there can be no more enjoyable spectacle than that afforded by the so-called Liberalist party in the German Reichstag between the horns of that dilemma into which that implacable logician, Prince Bismarck, has driven them, his agents in Parliament and the journalists in his pay keeping the horns of the dilemma constantly before them: either they are rank republicans and are guilty of hypocrisy and perjury when they surpass each other in protestations of loyalty, or else they are sincere in their loyalty to the Emperor, and if so, they must prove it by obedience to his will. This "either—or else" are like hammer and anvil between which the Liberalists are pounded to a jelly that not even a dog would touch. It is intensely amusing to see how these weak-spirited parties in the Reichstag writhe beneath the iron grasp of that pitiless logic. How they long to escape, and yet they cannot! They are devoted to the reigning dynasty, the Emperor has no more attached subjects than they are, a republic would be an abomination of desolation in their opinion,