maintenance of peace. It was the failure to understand this on the part
of the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought
all monarchy to the question. The implicit theory that supported the
intermarrying German royal families in Europe was that their
inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a
mitigation of national and racial animosities. In the days when Queen
Victoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument.
King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it was
understood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs.
The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for
our good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and
jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. They
seemed to give a _raison d'être_ for mankind. It is the Emperor William
and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own
strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of
Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed the
shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of
Königsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. Moreover in support of the
dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in
possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of
disturbing existing things. Life is full of vestigial structures, and it
is a long way to logical perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue,
with what we have. And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men
patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the
insecurity of republican institutions.

You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that "kings are better
than pronunciamentos"; there was an article upon Greece to this effect
quite recently in that uncertain paper _The New Statesman_. Then a kind
of illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics,