The good Haroun Alraschid!"
We accept Haroun; and acknowledge him to have been wise in the purport
of his wanderings through the streets of the city,--gaining new
experience with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of
his people for himself;--but if we should be told of a modern monarch
doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse
of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the
dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more
contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a
Man,--and, on the other hand, nothing could be more beneficial than the
feeling that perhaps a monarch may be so much of a man after all that
no one can be quite certain as to his whereabouts. It would be well if
some rowdy 'clubs' could be restrained by the idea that the Sovereign
of the Realm might step in unexpectedly,--or if the 'slums' could
scarcely be able to tell when he might not be among their inmates,
disguised as one of them, studying and knowing more in a day than his
ministers would tell him in several years. It is generally admitted
that no man is fit for a profession till he has thoroughly mastered its
possibilities,--yet it is not too much to declare that in the
profession of Sovereignty the few who practise it, have mastered it to
so little purpose, that they are almost entirely blind to the singular
advantages which they might obtain, not only for themselves, but for
the entire world, if they chose to put forth their own individuality,
and, instead of wasting their time on the scheming and self-seeking
sections of Society, elected to try their powers on the working and
trade communities of the nation.
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