not only totally unnecessary but inevitably mischievous, since it
evidently meant street fighting and provisional government by bold,
bad, blood-stained, vulgar men, in shirt sleeves as the essential
features of the process. And under the enervating influence of this
great automatic theory--this theory that no one need bother because the
thing was bound to come, was indeed already arriving for all who had
eyes to see--Republicanism did not so much die as fall asleep. It was
all right, Liberalism told us--the Crown was a legal fiction, the House
of Lords was an interesting anachronism, and in that faith it was, no
doubt, that the last of the Republicans, Mr. Bright and Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, "kissed hands." Then, presently, the frantic politics of
Mr. Gladstone effected what probably no other human agency could have
contrived, and restored the prestige of the House of Lords.

Practically the Crown has now gone unchallenged by press, pulpit, or
platform speaker for thirty years, and as a natural consequence there
is just now a smaller proportion of men under forty who call themselves
Republicans even in private than there ever was since Plutarch entered
the circle of English reading. To-day the Aristocratic Monarchy is an
almost universally accepted fact in the British Empire, and it has so
complete an air of unshakable permanence to contrast with its condition
in the early nineteenth century that even the fact that it is the only
really concrete obstacle to a political reunion of the English-speaking
peoples at the present time, seems merely a fact to avoid.

There are certain consequences that must follow from the unchallenged
acceptation of an aristocratic monarchy, consequences that do not seem
to be sufficiently recognized in this connection, and it is to these
that the reader's attention is now particularly drawn. There are a
great number of British people who are more or less sincerely seeking