navy and thus sit in the rear of a noble of lower degree namely, Viscount
Canaan, lord justice of the common pleas. This turned the Duke of
Bethany into tolerably open malcontent and a secret conspirator--a thing
which the emperor foresaw, but could not help.

Things went from bad to worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the
peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for
reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry
Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused
trouble in a powerful quarter--the church. The new empress secured the
support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in the
nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this made
deadly enemies of the remaining twelve. The families of the maids of
honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep
house. The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen as
servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and other
great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform other
menial and equally distasteful services. This made bad blood in that
department.

Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support of
the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were
intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary. The
emperor's reply--"Look--Look at Germany; look at Italy. Are you better
than they? and haven't you unification?"---did not satisfy them. They
said, "People can't eat unification, and we are starving. Agriculture
has ceased. Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,
everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with
nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields--"