nd brutal scramble for social
recognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has many
chances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls
of his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur
the risk of erring on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and
push him in where his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated
with kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he
has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he
would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in
mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his
rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and
fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of
vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob
is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.

An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the irreverent
Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially as "The Old
Lady," But the editor in question did not so designate her--his simple
American manhood and republican spirit would not admit that she was
a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait "Her Most
Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria" This incident raises an important
question.

Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a subject
and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey--to own the sway of a "gory
tyrant" and retain one's self-respect, or dwell, a "sovereign elector,"
in the land of liberty and disgrace it?

However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate the
English sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in
designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would
not say "His Abracadabral Humpti-dumptiness Emperor William," nor "His
Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives."
They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled
American sovereign elector "His Badgesty." Of a foreign nobleman they do
not say "His Lordship;" they will not admit that he is a lord; nor when
speaking of their own noblemen do they spell "lord" with a capital L, as
we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries, of whatever rank
in their own countries, the English press is simply and serviceably
descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the jack