NOTEBOOK
to exalt the few, the misery of the many for the happiness
of the few, the cold and hunger and overworking of the
useful that the useless may live in luxury and idleness.
The system of our Indians is high and juster, for only
merit makes a man chief, and his son cannot take the
place if there is another man better fitted for it.
Observe how monarchies and nobilities are sprung upon
a heedless and ignorant people. Chiefs rise by the one
divine right—capacity, merit. One of these shows merit
for war and government above all the rest, he conspires
with a faction of the chiefs and is made king. The body
of the people ignored, allowed no vote, their desires in the
matter held to be of no consequence by these upstarts.
The conspirators make the succession permanent in this
king's family, and the crime is complete. It is the same
sort of crime that surprise and seizure of a weak com-
munity's property by a robber gang, and the conversion
of the community itself into slaves, is. All monarchies
have been so built; there was never a throne which did
not represent a crime; there is no throne today which
does not represent a crime, A monarchy is perpetuated
piracy. In its escutcheon should always be the skull and
crossbones.
What a funny thing is monarchy and how curious its
assumptions. It commits a crime and assumes that lapse
of time removes the criminality; it does a dishonest thing
and assumes that lapse of time removes the taint, as if it
were a mere smell, and perishable; it does a shameful
thing and assumes that lapse of time transfigures it and
makes it a thing to be proud of. It assumes that a wrong
maintained for a dozen or a thousand years, becomes a
right. It assumes that the wronged parties will presently
give up and take the same view—that at least their de-
scendants will. Now, by an effort one can imagine a family
of bears taking pride in the historic fact that an ancestor
of theirs took violent possession of a bee tree some cen-
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