y millions of people, nay, even hundreds of millions, become
the willing and obedient subjects of one man, sometimes even one
woman, and provisionally, even, of a child, unless there were a
monarchical instinct in men which drove them to it as the form of
government best suited to them? This arrangement is not the product
of reflection. Everywhere one man is king, and for the most part his
dignity is hereditary. He is, as it were, the personification, the
monogram, of the whole people, which attains an individuality in him.
In this sense he can rightly say: _l'etat c'est moi_. It is precisely
for this reason that in Shakespeare's historical plays the kings
of England and France mutually address each other as _France_ and
_England_, and the Duke of Austria goes by the name of his country. It
is as though the kings regarded themselves as the incarnation of their
nationalities. It is all in accordance with human nature; and for this
very reason the hereditary monarch cannot separate his own welfare and
that of his family from the welfare of his country; as, on the other
hand, mostly happens when the monarch is elected, as, for instance, in
the States of the Church.[1] The Chinese can conceive of a monarchical
government only; what a republic is they utterly fail to understand.
When a Dutch legation was in China in the year 1658, it was obliged to
represent that the Prince of Orange was their king, as otherwise the
Chinese would have been inclined to take Holland for a nest of pirates
living without any lord or master.[2] Stobaeus, in a chapter in his
_Florilegium_, at the head of which he wrote _That monarchy is best_,
collected the best of the passages in which the ancients explained
the advantages of that form of government. In a word, republics are
unnatural and artificial; they are the product of reflection. Hence it
is that they occur only as rare exceptions in the whole history of
the world. There were the small Greek republics, the Roman and the
Carthaginian; but they were all rendered possible by the fact that
five-sixths, perhaps even seven-eighths, of the population consisted
of slaves. In the year 1840, even in the United States, there were
three million slaves to a population of sixteen millions. Then, again,
the duration of the republics of antiquity, compared with that of
monarchies, was very short. Republics are very easy to found, and
very difficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the
revers