are
alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not
invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such
as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;
but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands,
such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history
a King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility
and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was
strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown
because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And
President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such,
in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a
matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and
applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on
pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It
is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed
futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation
for the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did
disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of
the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy.

Thus the American King and the English President are the very opposite
of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national
indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness
and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It
may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new American
President represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense
he marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommon
politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard
him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may
roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this
they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist
conservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding a
Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do
entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was
normal. But there are very few who think so,