Ultra-royalism

“ It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,—have we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism. ”

“ Without power, neither Civilization nor the Empire could hold itself together, and His Universal Majesty, the Emperor Carl, well knew it. And power was linked solidly to one element, one metal, without which Civilization would collapse as surely as if it had been blasted out of existence. Without the power metal, no ship could move or even be built ”

“ Phantis: (aside) Baffled!
Scaphio: But an hour will come!
King: Your hour has come already—away with them, and let them
wait my will! (Scaphio and Phantis are led off in
custody.)
From this moment Government by Party is adopted, with all
its attendant blessings; and henceforward Utopia will no
longer be a Monarchy Limited, but, what is a great deal
better, a Limited Monarchy!
FINALE
Zara: There's a little group of isles beyond the wave—
So tiny, you might almost wonder where it is—
That nation is the bravest of the brave,
And cowards are the rarest of all rarities. ”

“ The architects were great, the king's thought was great—but only in one way—and everyone—the whole class—forgot the real meaning of noblesse oblige, and abused their power—and so the revolution swept them away—They put false value upon everything—false values upon birth and breeding—and no value upon their consequent obligations, or upon character—. ”

“ And all this time we are in an epoch of expansion; and the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one salvation of an epoch of expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. The more, therefore, an aristocracy calls to its aid its innate forces,—its impenetrability, its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance,—to deal with an epoch of expansion, the graver is the danger, the greater the certainty of explosion, the surer the aristocracy's defeat ”

“ But liberty and barbarism do not mean the same thing to both sides.
Barbarous despotism, the worst enemy to liberty, is exemplified for us Frenchmen, Englishmen, men of the West, in Prussian Imperialism; and I venture to think that the register of its methods is plainly set forth in the devastated route from Liège to Senlis, passing by way of Louvain, Malines, and Rheims. For Germany, the monster ("Ungeheuer," as the aged Wundt calls it) , which threatens civilization is Russia, and the bitterest reproach which the Germans hurl against France is our alliance with the Empire of the Czar. ”

“ Any freedom, though seemingly the most remote from any possible bearing upon the tyrant, may—will grow from a little leak of liberty into a [Pg 298] mighty flood, sweeping his palaces and dungeons away. The czar knows that if he lets his people have so much freedom as free talk in their sitting-rooms their talk will gather into a tornado. In all ages wealth, like all power, has found that it must rule all or nothing. Its destiny is rule or ruin, and rule is but a slower ruin. ”

“ Nothing can escape the law which simplifies. By the mere force of things, the material side of facts and of men disintegrates and disappears. There is no shadowy solidity; whatever may be the mass, whatever may be the block, every combination of ashes (and matter is nothing else) returns to ashes. The idea of the atom of dust is in the word "granite,"—inevitable pulverizations. All those granites of oligarchy, aristocracy, and theocracy are doomed to be scattered to the four winds. ”

“ From this usurpation is formed the almost insurmountable barrier against human liberty, "the imperium in imperio," or the visionary empire of supernaturalism within, and either confederate with, or independent of, the secular empire. All belief in anything supernatural is a pitiable and deplorable hallucination of mind, everything pretending to be such being the offspring of sheer imposture; and until the age of reason and science shall have succeeded those ages of delusion and ignorance through which the world has hitherto rolled, the paramount power upon its surface will be priestcraft. ”

“ When one remembers the long commercial tyranny that followed the Napoleonic wars, the tyranny under which money-making became the chief duty of man, under which Art foundered and middle-class morality flourished, one grows uneasy. And if one cannot forget the stragglers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-Revolutionary people who, in the reign of Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism, blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues [Pg 255] beneath the scandalized brows of neo-Catholic grandchildren, one becomes exceedingly sorry for oneself. ”

“ Writers of Roman history have been too much in the habit of representing the later Republic and early Empire as, practically, a Universal Monarchy, a Power unchecked, unbalanced, having no other limits than those of the civilized world, engrossing consequently the whole attention of all thinking men, and free to act exactly as it pleased without any regard to opinion beyond its own borders. ”

“ This is the constant practice of the philosophers of certain schools, but few of them acknowledge it as frankly as Rousseau. Had the facts of human nature and human history been seriously considered, we should have no Republic of Plato, no Utopia of More; the world would be a very different place from what it is; for these cloudy cities, the laws of whose architecture seem contrary to all the teachings of physics, yet gild with their glory and darken with their shadows the solid temples and streets beneath them. ”

“ What you ask is impossible. It is just as impossible now as it was when we discussed it in Paris last year. To sit down in Vienna and learn how to keep that leaning tower of an Empire from tumbling down like a stack of bricks—it does not appeal to me. You have spent a laborious life in defending a silly medieval tradition of government. You are using all the apparatus of the modern world to perpetuate an ideal that is as old and dead as the Rameses dynasty. Every time you use the telegraph to send orders in an emperor's name you commit an anachronism. ”

“ Literature is divided, in the first place, into several zones, but our great men are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are 'Romantics,' the Liberals are 'Classics.' The divergence of taste in matters literary and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies and nicknames a outrance, between the rising and the waning glory, and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the Royalist-Romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing laws and conventions ”

“ From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative justice is born. Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius which was Rome still pulses within it. By the energy of feudalism the ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged. Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills with its radiance a darkened world. Religious oppression is stayed, but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later, what a temple is reared for it by the Seine! ”

“ The freedom of the savage, the literary civilization of the Oriental, were held up to admiration by these two writers, diametrically opposed in their way of looking at life, but similar in their utter want of comprehension of all that was not European and contemporary. Next after the government of the sages and the elders Rousseau placed elective government, which, in common with some other abstract writers, he classes as aristocratic. An hereditary aristocracy he calls the worst of all governments. ”

“ The feudal system is falling—and that means the world. Erudition is in decay. Civilization is dying. Yes, indeed—You don't believe that? But if you have any historical outlook at all, you can see that it is so. The nobility started the Crusades. The nobility has done this and that and everything. Why is Germany being torn to pieces? Because the peasantry has risen against the nobility, thus cutting off its own head. ”

“ Such being the nature of this dark pestilence, the terrible evils it has produced in Europe for so many centuries, and is still producing even to this day are precisely what might be expected from such a cause.
* The demon of Toryism, which pervades Europe throughout, is the legitimate offspring of Priestcraft, Aristocracy and Co.—that is, a confederacy of the great monopolisers of the land and the church hierarchy, for the honest purpose of subjugating and fleecing the industrious wealth-producers. ”

“ In the loosely organized empires of the early type, a change of sovereign, especially if accompanied by revolutionary violence, is always regarded as an opportunity for rebellion. Doubt as to the condition of the capital paralyzes the imperial authority in the provinces; and bold men, taking advantage of the moment of weakness, start up in various places, asserting independence, and seeking to obtain for themselves kingdoms out of the chaos which they see around them. ”

“ This has always been and always must be the results of ultra-civilisation. The second step from utter barbarism which deals with conquest and cruelty, is but the beginning of the end of all nations, ancient and modern. The implacable order of nature is to grow and decline. Matter must change, although its constituents are immortal. ”

“ The qualities that made feudalism endeared and enduring; qualities written in beauty on the cathedral cities of mediaeval Europe—faith, worship, loyalty, magnanimity—were either vanished or banished from this pseudo-democratic, aridly scientific feudalism, leaving an inheritance of strife and tyranny—a strife grown mean, a tyranny grown prudent, but full of sinister power the weight of which we have by no means ceased to feel. ”

“ Then all who recognized that they had something at stake in civilization as it existed were startled and alarmed. Believers in the old religion, in old forms of government, in old manners and morals, men in fear for their heads and men in fear for their estates, were driven together. Absolutism and aristocracy, although entirely opposed to each other in principle, were forced into an unnatural alliance. ”

“ A fabrication of fancy, an arbitrary verbal proposition, has been exalted above reason, and made to extinguish common sense. The world is full of such dogmas. They mislead the actions of men, and confound the page of history. "The king cannot die" is one of them. It is held as an axiom of political and constitutional truth. So an entire dynasty, crowded with a more glorious life than any other, is struck from the annals of an empire. In the public records of Eng [ii.358] land, the existence of the Commonwealth is ignored ”

“ It can make revolutions re-organizers of the very abuses they overturn, and merely a wheel for turning up or down combinations equally oppressive. What is the difference between recommending the form or the substance of the European monarchies? Would it not be better, like the Lacedemonians, to adopt the form of monarchy without its substance, than to adopt its substance without its form? ”

“ In the Middle Ages, indeed, a bad king or a weak king might lose his throne or even his life; but in more settled times such things could not take place without a violent convulsion of the whole realm,—a truth only too well illustrated by the events of the seventeenth century. An orderly government cannot be founded on the basis of personal rule tempered by revolution. ”

“ A rebel was worse than the worst prince, and rebellion was worse than the worst government of the worst prince that hitherto had been. He proclaimed the anarchy of France and Russia to be a manifestation of diabolic ebullience, which ought to be restrained and stamped out by all right means, even the most stringent. ”

“ Every theory and crotchet has had full swing, and powers and dominations have bowed their necks to the yoke and cowered under the misbegotten tyranny which has suddenly changed places 257 with them. Democracy and philanthropy have never before (or hardly ever) had their own way without let or hindrance, carte blanche to work out their own great and fancy designs. This time they leave behind them—and all Europe exhibits the result—a mass of ruin, terror, and despair. Nothing strikes one more than the poverty of invention as well as the egregious folly of the new patriots all over the world. ”

“ It’s the old régime again, the rottenness and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. ”

“ In relation to the people, its sway is mild and paternal, indeed, but at the same time, intrusive, meddling and vexatious—it is, in short, a dead, mechanical absolutism, where all spontaneity of popular action has been destroyed—all equilibrium of powers overturned—and where royalty, by an irregular attraction, has disturbed, deranged, or compressed the movements of the other social bodies. ”

“ The nobles or chieftains gained increasing power with the decline of royalty, and the government became, in many States, aristocratic. But the nobles abused their power by making an oligarchy, which is a perverted aristocracy. This aroused hatred and opposition on the part of the people, especially in the maritime cities, where the increase of wealth by commerce and the arts raised up a body of powerful citizens. Then followed popular revolutions under leaders or demagogues. ”