to see the carriages go in and to guess who was in each.  To-morrow the Diplomatic Corps calls on King Christian and to-morrow night King George commands us to attend the opera as his guests.

Whether it’s the court, or the honours and the orders and all the social and imperial spoils, that keep the illusion up, or whether it is the Old World inability to change anything, you can’t ever quite decide.  In Defoe’s time they put pots of herbs on the desks of every court in London to keep the plague off.  The pots of herbs are yet put on every desk in every court room in London.  Several centuries ago somebody tried to break into the Bank of England.  A special guard was detached—­a little company of soldiers—­to stand watch at night.  The bank has twice been moved and is now housed in a building that would stand a siege; but that guard, in the same uniform goes on duty every night.  Nothing is ever abolished, nothing ever changed.  On the anniversary of King Charles’s execution, his statue in Trafalgar Square is covered with flowers.  Every month, too, new books appear about the mistresses of old kings—­as if they, too, were of more than usual interest:  I mean serious, historical books.  From the King’s palace to the humblest house I’ve been in, there are pictures of kings and queens.  In every house, too (to show how nothing ever changes), the towels are folded in the same peculiar way.  In every grate in the kingdom the coal fire is laid in precisely the same way.  There is not a salesman in any shop on Piccadilly who does not, in the season, wear a long-tail coat.  Everywhere they say a second grace at dinner—­not at the end—­but before the dessert, because two hundred years ago they dared not wait longer lest the parson be under the table:  the grace is said to-day before dessert!  I tried three months to persuade my “Boots” to leave off blacking the soles of my shoes under the instep.  He simply couldn’t do it.  Every “Boots” in the Kingdom does it.  A man of learning had an article in an afternoon paper a few weeks ago which began thus:  “It is now universally conceded by the French and the Americans that the decimal system is a failure,” and he went on to concoct a scheme for our money that would be more “rational” and “historical.”  In this hot debate about Ulster a frequent phrase used is, “Let us see if we can’t find the right formula to solve the difficulty”; their whole lives are formulas.  Now may not all the honours and garters and thistles and O.M.’s and K.C.B.’s and all manner of gaudy sinecures be secure, only because they can’t abolish anything?  My servants sit at table in a certain order, and Mrs. Page’s maid wouldn’t yield her precedence to a mere housemaid for any mortal consideration—­any more than a royal person of a certain rank would yield to one of a lower rank.  A real democracy is as far off as doomsday.  So you argue, till you remember that it is these same people who made human liberty possible—­to a degree—­and