Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/128

 its flatterers and bosh-mongers; the king has his courtiers. But there is yet a difference, and I think it is important. The courtier, at his worst, at least performs his genuflections before one who is theoretically his superior, and is surely not less than his equal. He does not have to abase himself before swine with whom, ordinarily, he would disdain to have any traffic. He is not compelled to pretend that he is a worse man than he really is. He needn’t hold his nose in order to approach his benefactor. Thus he may go into office without having dealt his honour a fatal wound, and once he is in, he is under no pressure to sacrifice it further, and may nurse it back to health and vigour. His sovereign, at worst, has a certain respect for it, and hesitates to strain it unduly; the mob has no sensitiveness on that point, and, indeed, no knowledge that it exists. The courtier’s sovereign, in other words, is apt to be a man of honour himself. When, in 1848 or thereabout, the late Wilhelm I of Prussia was offered the imperial crown by a so-called parliament of his subjects, he refused it on the ground that he could take it only from his equals, i. e., from the sovereign princes of the Reich. To the democrats of the world this attitude was