Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/127

Rh they testify to their submission, reverence and love of their monarchs and the royal families, are constantly trying to excuse their falsehood and lack of fidelity to their convictions, by maintaining that the accepted fraud of royalty is a harmless deception.

The monarchy, at least in honestly constitutional countries, is merely a bit of theatre scenery. The king has really less authority than the President of the United States of North America. England, Belgium and Italy are in reality republics with kings for the figureheads, and the inherited external forms of submission by which the crown is surrounded are mostly matters of habit, and prevent in no way the free action of the will of the people, and of the will of the people alone. This is a grave mistake which will prove fatal in many cases to the destinies of nations.

The power of the king is still immense; their influence even in such countries as Belgium and Roumania, England and Norway, is all-powerful, even if it does not affect directly the form of government, but acts with and through it. We have the moist reliable testimony of this fact. The right honorable Mr. Gladstone, who is certainly competent authority, expressed his opinion most significantly on the influence of kings in an early number of the Nineteenth Century. Certain publications of recent times throw sufficient light upon this subject, especially Martin's Life of the. Prince Consort, with the correspondence between Prince Albert and Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, afterwards King and Emperor, and the relations between Napoleon III. and the English Court, Baron Stockmar's Notes and Reminiscences, and many reliable portions of Schneider's and Meding's Memoirs. We learn from them how the web-work of intimate relations between the different sovereigns is spun over the heads of peoples, Parliaments