CHAPTER XXIX.
ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND—ROYALTY AND NOBILITY.
THIS will be found to be a mixed chapter, but I respectfully desire every American to read it very carefully, and to give it some thought after reading it. In America, where one man is as good as another, we have so much that is good that we do not appreciate the blessings we enjoy; we do not realize how much a free government is worth. I am going to put upon paper some few governmental facts, to the end of showing my countrymen what a good government is worth to them, and what a bad government costs the people who groan under it.
In a late number of that especial organ of king-worshipers, the London Illustrated News, there is a beautiful engraving, entitled “The Princess of Wales and Her Daughter, in the Garden of Sandringham.” It is a lovely picture. The garden itself is a study, with its wonderful shrubbery, and flowers, and statuary; a garden that falls but little short of being a Paradise. And the Princess of Wales and her six or eight daughters are just as lovely—by the way, as the British Parliament gives every child born in the royal family a princely estate and an enormous allowance to start with, the royal family all have large families—the Princess herself is arrayed in gorgeous morning costume, with a hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, with a parasol with silken fringe upon it a foot deep, and everything comporting. The children are likewise gorgeously arrayed, and one of them is teaching a pug dog how to sit up, the said pug costing the British people at least an hundred guineas. The entire party are in as jolly a state as can be imagined.
Now I like such scenes as this immensely. I like to see comfort and even luxury. Had the husband of this fortunate woman and the father of these happy children been, early in life, a shoemaker, a tailor, a lawyer, a merchant, or anything under heaven, and had by his own labor and his own skill accumulated the means for all this luxury, I should insist upon his right to enjoy it because he had earned it, and had given the world something for it. But how did this woman get it? Why is she with a parasol with silken fringe a foot deep, her children in silks and satins, while just as good children, and just as good women, in Ireland, are shoeless, stockingless and almost naked! What title has she to the gardens at Sandringham, and by what right does she starve the peasantry of Ireland that she may thus disport herself and her children?
Simply this: She is the wife a dissolute middle-aged man, whose stupid mother was the niece of a stupid uncle, who was the son or brother or something or other of the worst kind of a man in the world, who happened to be the son of a king who was half a lunatic and half an idiot—the same who attempted by hireling soldiery to subjugate America—who became a king because he was the descendant of a race of pirates, who by arms wrested from the people of the countries they invaded, all their rights, and assumed to own the land.
Have these people from first to last ever added one penny to the wealth of the world? Is there any one thing they have ever done to push forward the progress of the nations? Not a thing. On the contrary, they have been the dead weights; they have been the blocks in the way. They simply live, and eat, and drink, and wear and disport themselves in the gardens at Sandringham and an hundred other gardens; they have castles, and servants, and special trains, and all that sort of thing, and hundreds of Guinea pug dogs; and to support all this, with the horde of nobility hanging upon them, and their retainers, the men of Ireland are starving, and the women of Ireland are going shoeless, stockingless, and well nigh naked.
A DIRE WISH.
I am not especially cruel in my nature, but were the royal family of England to invite the royal family of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia, and the King of Italy, and the Sultan of Turkey, and all the kings of the world, with all their nobles, to an excursion on the German ocean, and were the ships all to go down to the bottom of the sea, and make an end of the whole business at once, I should thank Heaven more fervently than I ever did before in my life. Royalty is larceny in the first degree. It is larceny all the way down, according to the amount of the spoil.