Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/99

Rh republican, and leaving undisturbed the existing conditions of society, philosophy and economy, of which the monarchy is the logical sequence, has neither sense nor foundation. It is a violent, exclusively external disturbance such as would follow the decrees of an insane tyrant like Ivan the Terrible, if we could imagine such a being upon any throne at the present day. The logic of facts is against it from the start, and allows it only a brief period of duration. The phenomenon so often noticed in a cripple, is repeated in the organism of the people. As a man whose leg has been amputated suffers pain in the missing limb, a nation, after the amputation of the monarchy, and the substitution of a republican wooden leg, feels the twitches and agony of the missing monarchical form of government It resembles even a lower form of animal life, some of those rudimentary organisms whose amputated organs grow out again; there is an impelling force within them, that makes such organs indispensable to their existence, and reproduces the missing part in time.

Consequently I take no part in the either false or mistaken worship of a republic as conducted by some Liberalists, who bow the knee and sing hosannahs to the empty title of the republic. This religion whose god is merely a name, does not count me among its followers. In order to have the republic the necessary outward form of the internal organization of the State, the people who wish to be crystallized into this form, must comprehend the universe from the standpoint of natural science, and have swept out all the mediæval rubbish of transcendentalism and the hereditary differences of social station and property holding. A republic with religions recognized by the State, with transcendental formulas for oaths, with laws which punish the expression of contempt for God, with hereditary privileges of rank, and with the preponderating