not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically
most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern
men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying
crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and
neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of
their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer
should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered
from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms
capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man
who carries men's souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms
symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the
cavern of a merciful witchcraft.

There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody
laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter,
to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge
wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new
religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even
when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be
the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs,
disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a
great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen
the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the
whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They
realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud
and high-coloured pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind
its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal, the world has in
this matter followed English democracy rather than French; and those who
look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we
look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and