We are always canting about people’s “irreverence,” always charging this offense upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves.  Whenever we do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none of us are reverent—­in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are all irreverent.  There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the earth.  There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that —­and, like the best of us, has nothing higher.  To speak plainly, we despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things.  And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.  Suppose we should meet with a paragraph like the following, in the newspapers: 

“Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at Mount Vernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas.”

Should we be shocked?  Should we feel outraged?  Should we be amazed?  Should we call the performance a desecration?  Yes, that would all happen.  We should denounce those people in round terms, and call them hard names.

And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers: 

“Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires had a picnic in Westminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas.”

Would the English be shocked?  Would they feel outraged?  Would they be amazed?  Would they call the performance a desecration?  That would all happen.  The pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; they would be called hard names.

In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America’s most honored son; in the Abbey, the ashes of England’s greatest dead; the tomb of tombs, the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built by a great Emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stay and support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it her ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place; to them it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is to the English.

Major Sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine): 

“I would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and lunch parties which are sometimes given to European ladies and gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly out of place in a sepulchre.”

Were there any Americans among those lunch parties?  If they were invited, there were.