ach you that all this fuss-and-feathers,
all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding,
this "manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has no
decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience
open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd
imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the
managers of the performance?--that while you toss your greasy caps in
air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs
the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting
your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; "power is of the People,"
and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable
privilege--to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And
you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those
designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap!
But then you are not "subjects;" you are "citizens"--there is much
in that Your tyrant is not a "King;" he is a "President." He does
not occupy a "throne," but a "chair." He does not succeed to it by
inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you are
distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outside
his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all his life.

I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they set
foot upon our soil their kingship and their nobility fall away from them
like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in his
own country, here he is but a man. My countrymen may do as they please,
lickspittling the high and mighty of other nations even to the filling
of their spiritual bellies, but I make a stand for simple American
manhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greater
deference than I could properly accord to the President of my own
country. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lack
of faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are. All
the same, I will call no man "Your Majesty," nor "Your Lordship." For
me to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as much
preliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of
Moosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and
tide of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision.
With some of my most esteemed and p