generals. This pleased
the minister of war, but procured the enmity of all the mothers in the
land; for they said their precious ones must now find bloody graves in
the fields of war, and he would be answerable for it. Some of the more
heartbroken and unappeasable among them lay constantly wait for the
emperor and threw yams at him, unmindful of the body-guard.

On account of the extreme scarcity of material, it was found necessary
to require the Duke of Bethany postmaster-general, to pull stroke-oar
in the navy and thus sit in the rear of a noble of lower degree namely,
Viscount Canaan, lord-justice of the common pleas. This turned the Duke
of Bethany into tolerably open malcontent and a secret conspirator--a
thing which the emperor foresaw, but could not help.

Things went from bad to worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the
peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for
reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry
Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused
trouble in a powerful quarter--the church. The new empress secured the
support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in
the nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this
made deadly enemies of the remaining twelve. The families of the maids
of honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep
house. The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen
as servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and
other great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform
other menial and equally distasteful services. This made bad blood in
that department.

Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support
of the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were
intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary. The
emperor's reply--"Look--Look at Germany; look at Italy. Are you better
than they? and haven't you unification?"---did not satisfy them. They
said, "People can't eat unification, and we are starving. Agriculture
has ceased. Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,
everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with
nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields--"

"Look at Germany; look at Italy. It is the same there. Such is
unification, and there's no other way to get it--no other way to ke