“Man-like, of course,” Virginia interrupted with a smile.
“First, I wish to pay you personally the highest tribute a man in my position can give to any man or women. I am going to offer you the second highest place in the Empire next to mine. Your fortune has disappeared in the wreck of war. You shall rebuild it tenfold through the work I shall place in your hands. My first ambition now is really to pacify the mind of the States. It can be done through our women.
“I appeal to your reason. Here is the situation. The last hope of successful rebellion has been stamped out. The millions of America, completely disarmed, are helpless to resist our army of occupation. I wish, not only to complete the crushing of the last hope of insurrection; it is my ambition to convince the people that the central monarchical and aristocratic form of government is the only natural order of life and therefore a divine law.
“The quick intuitions of women have been always more open to this truth than the more brutal and anarchistic male mind. Women have always been the bulwark of aristocracy and imperial monarchy. Man is an anarchist—woman a royalist by instinct.
“The American democracy was only an accident of time and space. The oceans are now the King’s highway and he owns them by right of eminent domain. Democracy can never survive this bringing of the ends of the earth together. Democracy cannot live because when brought face to face with the monarchical form it is not worthy to live. The United States of America gave the human race the one supreme example of a weak, corrupt and contemptible government. The like of it was never known before in the history of man.
“Democracy is a disease—a form of crowd egomania which drives millions of people mad with the insane delusion that they have been called of God to do something for which they are utterly unfitted.
“All government worthy of the name must be conducted by a few brilliant minds—divine leaders—presided over by a supreme leader whom we call emperor or king. This is true in so-called democracies. The people only pretend to govern—imagine that they govern. They do not. A few master minds and brutal wills do it for them. Hence the system of bosses whose foul record we have ended forever.
“No nation can have an art or literature unless monarchical and aristocratic—America has never had a literature. It will have one only when its conscious life is reincarnated in the soul of a sovereign who takes his crown from God, not man.
“The people of this country were never fit to govern themselves. They got the kind of government they deserved. In Central Europe government has long been reduced to a science. Their cities are clean—their life as orderly as the movement of the stars.
“The monarchical form of government only can answer the questions of Socialism. Germany did this a generation ago. When the world-war came the Socialists were as loyal to the Emperor as the proudest prince of the blood.