KINGS AND CLOWNS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 293, 10 September 1910, Page 2

KINGS AND CLOWNS.

(By "Empedocles"). In the beginning let me not offend your loyalty. I am as loyal a subject as the rest of press writers, or, for the matter of that, as most of those people who work in, on or below the earth, or the waters which gird the earth. I am prepared to doff my hat and chant the words of "God Save the King" whenever occasion calls upon me to do so. and I abhor treason, sedition, sudden death, assassination and German barrel organs. But I object to the glorification of kings as deities because history has told us that they are, after all, most ordinary mortals, too often with only ordinary intellects. I believe that if occasion demanded, I might even bow my knee and kiss the royal hand. I would do this rather as a custom than because I believe in it. I cannot see what good can come of such a practice; there is about it, too, a certain loss of dignity on the part of the kisser and the kissed. But we, good healthy red folk, like to have our kings and our queens, and we like to think that in order to show our loyalty we must take off our hats when the National Anthem is played. Some day, I expect, we won't look at things at all in"that way. We will do more by deeds than by words, and I believe we will be a cleaner, happier people for it. It is quite right and fine to have a head of a nation to whom we can all look for examples and precepts. Yet how many people really come into touch with kings or queens. We can wave out hats and shout as they pass along in their carriages, but if we approached them to speak, as even humble and devoted subects, we should probably be ignominiously "run in" and stand charged with attempted assassination. So, really, kings are very far removed from us. But let us not care. We will cry aloud and shout whenever possible, and we will show our loyalty by mouth and compare our king with all the other kings to the detriment of the latter, and be happy. Well, why not? Kings and clowns I find are very closely allied. Too often the sceptre is but the bauble-staff of the fool; too often the ermine and velvet the motley of the jester; too often the crown the coxcomb of the clown. There is a difference only in degree. We have, for example, that august dignitary, William of Germany. Now, personally, I have some little regard for Bill. It is true that I have maligned him and made fun of him and his methods, but I don't think he is quite responsible for his actions or his utterances. He should have lived in the Middle Ages, when knights were bold and tore up the turf with prancing war-horses, when might was right and you could hurl defiance from the turrets of the castle walls. William would then have been a glorious figure. He would have probably spent half his time in subduing his neighbours and the other half in polishing up his vanity. But in the common-places of the twentieth century he is a purple spludge in a sea of grey, and some fine day, if he lives long enough the grey waves will roll remorselessly over him and there will be no more purple. William is not noted for anything more than his desire to sit side by side with the Creator and see the Germans rule the seas. Some dawn- will bring in a day when a most orthodox and phlegmatic Parliament will leg-rope William, and his speeches will be written for him. He will be no longer allowed to insult the nations by cheap clap-trap about being the "Instrument of Heaven." It will be a great awakening for William. Napoleon was a great warrior and a great thinker, but as a ruler he was a dismal failure. But he did not talk clap-trap incessantly. He did get out with his coat off and do things, albeit some of them were very badly done. Of course, Napoleon was unhappily situated in his married life. Josephine, despite what has been made of her, was a liar, a spendthrift, and a heartless flirt. The story of the disaster which overtook him when he divorced her for the Austrian lady is mere balderdash. He would probably have done better had he incontinently fired her out years before. But the story is pretty and we like to think that it was a just retribution for his insatiable egotism and thirst for greatness. And just because he was a king the story is still read, cherished and believed in. The Napoleon-Josephine scandal is one of the dirtiest pages in the history of fair France. It is a foul blot on the petals of her lilies; but it is romantic and saddening and the women like it. But no decent journal would print juch a story now-a-days in all its filthy nakedness. It has to be remembered that a king is a pretty costly personage to keep. Thousands of pounds have to be paid away every year not only to his Kingship, but also to the crowds of lesser lights which flutter round the court. His Kingship gets a salary whether he is in reality a king or a clown. There is no such thing as paying for brains, because few rulers have any, and if they had they wouldn't be allowed to use them. How many kings, past and present, would be retained as managers of a big public company for more than twenty-four hours? Of course, you, dear, loyal souls, you will argue that they have never been brought up to commercialism and that they can never be efficient managers of anything having the vulgar taint of commerce running through it. Ah, well, quite so. But the successful king of finance is born, not made. Leopold, of Belgium, with all his faults, was the one shining light as a commercial magnate. -He put the millionaires of the world in the shade. It would have paid him fifty times over to have put the sceptre on the shelf and have taken up the ledger, the pep, and the telegraph. As a ruler be was npt a sucr cess, but only because he did not come up to the generally accepted ideas as regards kings, He was dishonest as a king whereas he would have been credited with admirable business acumen were he engaged in commercial pursuits alone, ft is argued that he was immoral. Well, so was Napoleon

and so was Charles 11. Yet both are held high in esteem because one was a great warrior and the other a "Merry Monarch." There are others that could be mentioned who had the common failing, but the list is lengthy and it is disgusting. I only mention it to show that kings are quite ordinary individuals, much the same as I am and you are. In the peculiar tradition of royal blood I am no believer. I have seen rich, blue veins on the temples of a child brought up in the gutter, or on the brows of a convalescent navvy. It would be the mainstay of the world's royalty were they to import a healthy strain of peasant blood into their enfeebled and impoverished constitutions. Then we might have kings and rulers fit to take their places in the world. We would not have puppets sitting on thrones drawing their salaries and their breath alone. The world requires workers and leaders. There is no reason why a king should not be both. At present kings are because their fathers were before them. They do not earn the position any more than many of them merit it. I know I shall be called an anarchist, a republicanist, a revolutionist, and many other hard names ending in "ist" for saying this. But, I frankly don't care. We have had kings who have also been men, but we have had too few of them. Edward VII. was one, and George V. will probably be another. But in the other balance we have the murderous Richard 111., the miserable John, the spineless Charles 1., and I am only taking the English dynasties. I tremble to think of the kings of other countries. The less said about them the better. A man is not loyal to himself who parades his loyalty for a clown. And a clown "perked up in a glistering grief" is a nation's calamity. And there are several clowns sitting upon European thrones to-day. As kings they are failures. Under the able management of Barnum of J. C. Williamson they might be successes.