f necessary,
by seeking annexation to Canada under the crown of our common ancestors,
or by inviting the exiled Dom Pedro to recross the Atlantic and accept
the throne of a North American Empire, with substantial guarantees that
if we should ever change our minds and put him politely on board a ship
again for Europe, the cheque given to him on his departure would not be
dishonoured on presentation to the national bankers!

It is the penalty, I suppose, of our position in the United States, as
the first and, so far, the only successful great republic of modern
times, that we are expected to accept a sort of moral responsibility for
all the experiments in republicanism, no matter how absurd, odious, or
preposterous they may be, which it may come into the heads of people
anywhere else in the world to try. I do not see why Americans who are
not under some strenuous necessity of making stump speeches in or out of
Congress, with an eye to some impending election, should submit to this
without a protest. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery: it
does not follow that it is the most agreeable.

I do not know that Western drawing-rooms take more delight in the
Japanese, who most amiably present themselves everywhere in the
regulation dress-coat and white cravat of modern Christendom, than in
the Chinese, who calmly and haughtily persist in wearing the ample,
stately, and comfortable garments of their own people.

The framers of the French Republican Constitution of 1875 did the United
States the honour to copy incorrectly, and absolutely to misapply,
certain leading features of our organic law. In order to accomplish
purposes absolutely inconsistent with all American ideas of liberty and
of justice, the parliamentary revolutionists who got possession of power
in France in 1879 have so twisted to their own ends this French
Constitution of 1875, that their government of the Third French Republic
in 1890 really resembles the government of the Akhoond of Swat about as
nearly as it resembles the government of the American Republic under
Washington.

The parliamentary revolutionists of the Third French Republic are
Republicans first and then Frenchmen. The framers of the American
Republic were Americans first and then Republicans. The Republic which
they framed was an experiment imposed upon the American people, not by
philosophers and fanatics, but by the force of circumstances. The ablest
of the men who framed it were n