Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/109

 shattered reputation of his Royal Highness with surprising cunning. After the theatrical and almost blasphemous apotheosis of the prince at St. Paul's on the occasion of his recovery from an illness which it would take a great deal to convince me was not purposely exaggerated, it was evidently felt that almost any thing might be attempted in the way of humbugging the people. Vult populus decipi et decipiatur. The republican mayor was to be put on his metal; and what he did was this: he agreed to receive the prince as the guest of the town; but he voted against defraying any portion of the expenses of the royal visit out of the public rates. Rather than that, he would be host himself. For the rest, to have received the young man at all, Mr. Chamberlain could not have gone through the performance with less offence to republican feeling. His language was a miracle of dexterous steering between loyalty to the people and loyalty to the prince,—two interests forever incompatible. All the same his Royal Highness had the best of it. What royalty wanted was a big gratis advertisement at the expense of the Radical Mecca, and it got it. The British monarchy exists, as quack medicines exist, by dint of wholesale "puffing;" the only difference being that the first is gratuitously advertised by its dupes, while notices of the latter are paid for by the parties directly interested. Now the mayor unquestionably placed himself among the dupes of royalty; but I am free to admit he was in a strait place.

But Mr. Chamberlain's mayoralty was distinguished by more useful, if less ornamental, work than that of entertaining worthless princes. In the successive years during which he presided over the town council with