Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/126

112 he declares that to die for his Emperor would be the highest happiness that could befall him. But anthropology and atavism and heredity, all the fine words which I have called upon to aid me in defending the loyalty of the ignorant and uncultivated, all these leave me in the lurch when I come to the Byzantinism of cultured and enlightened minds. Their Byzantinism is and remains, a conscious lie. It has no root in the character. It is a farce in which each one is working for pay; some for offices and wealth; others for titles and decorations, a third for some political reason, because the monarchy seems to him necessary, for the moment, to the welfare of the people, or for the interests of his caste,—all are working for an immediate or indirect personal advantage. And this is what makes the lie of the monarchy so much more repulsive than the lie of Religion. The enlightened man who bends the knee in church and murmurs prayers, does it from mental indolence or indifference, or from a cowardly acquiescence in custom; even if he is a hypocrite, and is trying to win the favor of the priests and their powerful influence by his counterfeit piety, he only humiliates himself before a symbol and does not kiss the hand from which he expects the reward. But the sycophantic courtier, the citizen illuminating and decorating his house with garlands of flowers, the poet composing odes in honor of royal marriages and the births of princes, they are all only working for the pay which they will presently receive, and are in no respect superior to the demi-mondaine, intent only upon coining money with her smiles.

Many persons who consider a king as a human being like all the rest, only more insignificant and less talented, who laugh at the preordained divine mission of the reigning dynasties, and admit that they are acting a lie when