victorias, hansoms, and four-wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered
dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their
way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and
horses. No one concerned seemed to feel anything odd in the effect,
though to the unwonted American the sight of a dignitary in full
canonicals or regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is
not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by romance. At one moment
a middle-aged lady in the line of vehicles put her person well out of
the window of her four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her
driver in something. She may not have been going to the levee, but one
felt that if she had been she would still have done what it abashed the
alien to see.

We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English in matters of
English state; we, who have no state at all require them to live up to
theirs, just as quite plain, elderly observers expect every woman to be
young and pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly the
secret of enduring so much state as the English have lies in knowing how
and when to shirk it, to drop it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon
this fact, if it is a fact, would find his knuckles warningly rapped
when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed empty of
etiquette. But the rapping would be very gentle, very kindly, for this
is the genius of English rule where it is not concerned with criminal
offence. You must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but you
are "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh
imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between
the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between
an oligarchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more spared in the
one and the self-respect in the other, though this is saying it too
loosely, and may not be saying it truly; it is only a conjecture with