In my judgment, this entire incident of the President’s “tour” was discreditable to President and people. I do not go into the question of his motive in making it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me an outrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republican institutions. In all but the name it was a “royal progress”—the same costly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemn and senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many before the One. According to republican traditions ten thousand times a year affirmed in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondly persuade ourselves that we hold as a true faith in the hearts of our hearts that the One is the servant of the Many! And it is no mere political catchphrase: he is their servant; he is their creature; all that in him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctive and inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonial imposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen has made the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. It is precisely this thing—the superiority of the people to their servants—that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood to constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the system which they uprooted and the one which they planted in its stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when the noxious harvestage had been cast as rubbish to the void!
I am no contestant for forms of government—no believer in either the excellence or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. That all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of the phrase, I hold, not as I observe it held by others, but as a living faith. That an officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his political superior, owing him no deference, but entitled to such deference from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of his subordination—these are propositions which command my assent, which I feel to be true and which determine the character of my personal relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for “the President’s great office” is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist. They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the superstition of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.
Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a thieving corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and swining—unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd “progress,” does not prove it, and the presumption of his “great office” is against him.
Can you not see, poor misguided “fellow citizens,” how you permit your political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers, all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this “manifestation of a proper respect for the nation’s head” has no decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the managers of the performance?—that while you toss your greasy caps in air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege—to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles in stock! But then you are not “subjects;” you are “citizens”—there is much in that. Your tyrant is not a “king;” he is a “president.” He does not occupy a “throne,” but a “chair.” He does not succeed to it by inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you are distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outside his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all his life.
III
I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they set foot upon our soil their royalty and their nobility fall away from them like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in his own country, here he is only a man. My countrymen may do as they please, but I make a stand for simple American manhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greater deference than I could properly accord to a citizen of my own country. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lack of faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are; all the same, I will call no man “your majesty,” nor “your lordship.” For me to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as much preliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of Moosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and title of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision.
With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and their forbearance in demand challenges my astonishment as one of the seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of their “presentation,” and as examples of simple republican dignity I commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the outlines of the human ham.