Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/112

 98 proud. You have disgraceful streets and trams, of which you should be ashamed. Yet you ridicule your city as if you were ashamed of that, and defend your trams as if you were proud of them. If you think it funny to be imposed on, you will never be at a loss for a joke."

Yet corruption in office, like hypocrisy in religion, has furnished food for mirth ever since King Log and King Stork began their beneficent reigns. Diogenes complained that the people of Athens liked to have the things they should have held most dear pelted with dangerous banter. Kant found precisely the same fault with the French, and even the history of sober England is enlivened by its share of such satiric laughter. "Wood was dear at Newmarket," said a wit, when Sir Henry Montague received there the white staff which made him Lord High Treasurer of England, for which exalted honor he had paid King James the First full twenty thousand pounds. The jest sounds so light-hearted, so free from any troublesome resentment, that it might have been uttered in America; but it is well to remember that such witticisms pointed