! The errand-boy didn't know you from Adam, and no one
but your private secretary was with you at the time; at least, so I
gathered: it was before breakfast and you had given the detectives the
slip. Well, then, merely by letting your human nature and your sense of
decency have free play you help to run the monarchic system--you almost
make a success of it. But you stop just where you ought to go on. You
are natural--you are yourself--where there is no opposition to your
being so. If you would go on being natural where there _is_
opposition--where all sorts of high social and political reasons step in
and forbid--you would find yourself far more powerful than the
Constitution intended you to be, for you would have the people with you.
There is a mountain of sentiment ready to rush to your side if you only
had the faith to call it to you. Have you not noticed, whenever a royal
engagement is announced, how every paper in the land declares it to be a
real genuine love-match? And you know--well, you know. I myself can
remember Aunt Sophie crying her eyes out for love of the Bishop of
Bogaboo whom she fell in love with at a missionary meeting and wasn't
allowed to marry; and six weeks later her engagement to Prince
Wolf-im-Schafs-Kleider was announced as a sudden and romantic
love-match! Why, he had only been sent for to be looked at when the
Bogaboo affair became dangerous; and so Aunt Sophie was coerced into
that melancholy mold of a jelly which she has retained ever since.

"Now that is where my grandfather showed himself out of touch with the
spirit of the age. Had he allowed Aunt Sophie to marry the Bishop and go
out during the cool months of the year to teach Bogaboo ladies the use
of the crinoline--it was just when crinolines were going out of fashion
here, and they could have got them cheap--he would have done a most
popular stroke for the monarchy."

"But you forget, my dear boy," said the King, "the Bogaboos were at that
time a really dangerous tribe--they still practised cannibalism."

"Yes, they still had their natural instincts unimpaired; the Christian
substitute of gin had not yet taken hold on them, and their national
institution still provided the one form of useful martyrdom that was
left to us. Had Aunt Sophie, or her husband, been eaten by savages there
would have been a boom in missions, and both the Church and the monarchy
would have benefited enormously. Royalty must take its risks. Kings no
longer r