Constitutions when first promulgated are received with wild enthusiasm.
In Italy, during the most frenzied period of Garibaldian worship, my
old friend, Lear the artist, asked a patriotic inn-keeper, who was in a
wild state of excitement, to give him breakfast, to which the man
replied: "Colazione! Che colazione! Tutto è amore e libertà!" In the
Albanian village in which Miss Durham was residing when the Young Turks
proclaimed their constitution, the Moslem inhabitants expressed great
delight at the news, and forthwith asked when the massacre of the
Giaours--without which a constitution would wholly miss its mark--was to
begin.[66] Similarly, Mr. Bland says that throughout China, although
"the word 'Republic' meant no more to the people at large than the
blessed word 'Mesopotamia,' men embraced each other publicly and wept
for joy at the coming of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

These ebullitions provoke laughter.

Sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni.

We Europeans have ourselves passed through much the same phases. Vandal
and others have told us of the Utopia which was created in the minds of
the French when the old régime crashed to the ground. Sydney Smith
caricatured the delusive hopes excited by the passing of the Reform Bill
of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that
they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a
heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may
confidently be anticipated in Ireland if the Home Rule Bill becomes law,
and the fairy prospects held out to the Irish people by Mr. Redmond and
the other stage managers of the piece are chilled by the cold shade of
reality.