Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic system in Europe—­which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a halting-place upon the way to human unity—­rested very largely upon the maintenance of peace.  It was the failure to understand this on the part of the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought all monarchy to the question.  The implicit theory that supported the intermarrying German royal families in Europe was that their inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a mitigation of national and racial animosities.  In the days when Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument.  King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it was understood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs.  The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for our good.  Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere.  They seemed to give a raison d’etre for mankind.  It is the Emperor William and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions.  The wisdom of Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars.  It needed the shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of Koenigsberg to the mind of the ordinary man.  Moreover in support of the dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of disturbing existing things.  Life is full of vestigial structures, and it is a long way to logical perfection.  Let us keep on, they would argue, with what we have.  And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the insecurity of republican institutions.

You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that “kings are better than pronunciamentos”; there was an article upon Greece to this effect quite recently in that uncertain paper The New Statesman.  Then a kind of illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics, although the internal disturbances of the South American republics have diminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades and although pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, the United States, or France.  But there can be no doubt that the influence of the Germanic monarchy up to the death of Queen Victoria upon British thought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modern republics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation to Germany.  We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to German colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of dangerous hostility to France.  A practice of sneering at things American has died only very recently out of English journalism