h the emperor foresaw, but could not help.

Things went from bad to worse. The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the
peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for
reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry
Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem. This caused
trouble in a powerful quarter--the church. The new empress secured the
support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in the
nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this made
deadly enemies of the remaining twelve. The families of the maids of
honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep
house. The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen as
servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and other
great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform other
menial and equally distasteful services. This made bad blood in that
department.

Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support of
the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were
intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary. The
emperor's reply--"Look--Look at Germany; look at Italy. Are you better
than they? and haven't you unification?"---did not satisfy them. They
said, "People can't eat unification, and we are starving. Agriculture
has ceased. Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,
everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with
nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields--"

"Look at Germany; look at Italy. It is the same there. Such is
unification, and there's no other way to get it--no other way to keep it
after you've got it," said the poor emperor always.

But the grumblers only replied, "We can't stand the taxes--we can't stand
them."

Now right on top of this the cabinet reported a national debt amounting
to upward of forty-five dollars--half a dollar to every individual in the
nation. And they proposed to fund something. They had heard that this
was always done in such emergencies. They proposed duties on exports;
also on imports. And they wanted to issue bonds; also paper money,
redeemable in yams and cabbages in fifty years. They said the pay of the
army and of the navy and of the whole governmental machine was far in
arrears, and unless something was done, and done immediately, national
ba