with fervent aspirations which would lead an ill-informed spectator to imagine that they regarded the king’s health as mystically connected with the health of the nation: still describe bishops and the heads of families which have been sufficiently long idle and wealthy as their “lords.”
These archaeological survivals are, no doubt, innocuous, if irritating. The more serious feature is that they help to make so many people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which clogs and dulls the fire of the nation’s life. The nineteenth century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. Luckily, certain nations had won the right to do a good deal of talking before the king came to a decision, or the right to hold Parliaments, and Europe generally adopted this model. The Parliament House now towered upward in the city, and it did the real business of directing the nation’s affairs. The king became a kind of grand seal for the measures enacted by Parliament. Some nations, the number of which is increasing, regarded the seal as a costly and avoidable luxury, and abolished it: some kept the king, with all his stately language and pretty robes and sparkling
