ves.

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast
and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their
king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire.
There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them
if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free
vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its
descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies,
to the exclusion of all other families--including the voter's; and
would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised
to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible
glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's
families--_including his own_.

They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had
never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them
that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have
a say in the government. I said I had seen one--and that it would
last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all
unhit--at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me
to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could
soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had
the idea, and he brought his fist down and said _he_ didn't believe
a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down
in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation
its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes.
I said to myself:

"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would
make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove
myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its
system of government."

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real
thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing
to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are
extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out,
become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body
from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout
for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty
of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented
by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose
Constitut