Our fathers created this government as a protest against all that, and all that it implies. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself a member in good standing. I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty foreign princess as in her own country she had never received. I have seen a half-dozen American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one another in the profundity of their bows in the presence of the nigger King of Hawaii. The republican New World is no less impested with servility than the monarchial Old.
None can affect man's instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power and rank.
No European court journal, no European courtier, was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose. They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power.