have for many months been
using my influence at Washington to get this diplomatic see expanded
into an ambassadorship, with the idea, of course th--But never mind. Let
it go. It is of no consequence. I say it calmly; for I am calm. But at
the same time--However, the subject has no interest for me, and never
had. I never really intended to take the place, anyway--I made up my
mind to it months and months ago, nearly a year. But now, while I am
calm, I would like to say this--that so long as I shall continue to
possess an American's proper pride in the honour and dignity of his
country, I will not take any ambassadorship in the gift of the flag at
a salary short of $75,000 a year. If I shall be charged with wanting to
live beyond my country's means, I cannot help it. A country which cannot
afford ambassador's wages should be ashamed to have ambassadors.

Think of a Seventeen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar ambassador!
Particularly for America. Why it is the most ludicrous spectacle, the
most inconsistent and incongruous spectacle, contrivable by even the
most diseased imagination. It is a billionaire in a paper collar, a king
in a breechclout, an archangel in a tin halo. And, for pure sham and
hypocrisy, the salary is just the match of the ambassador's official
clothes--that boastful advertisement of a Republican Simplicity which
manifests itself at home in Fifty-thousand-dollar salaries to insurance
presidents and railway lawyers, and in domestic palaces whose fittings
and furnishings often transcend in costly display and splendour and
richness the fittings and furnishings of the palaces of the sceptred
masters of Europe; and which has invented and exported to the Old World
the palace-car, the sleeping-car, the tram-car, the electric trolley,
the best bicycles, the best motor-cars, the steam-heater, the best and
smartest systems of electric calls and telephonic aids to laziness and
comfort, the elevator, the private bath-room (hot and cold water on
tap), the palace-hotel, with its multifarious conveniences, comforts,
shows, and luxuries, the--oh, the list is interminable! In a word,
Republican Simplicity found Europe with one shirt on her back, so to
speak, as far as real luxuries, conveniences, and the comforts of
life go, and has clothed her to the chin with the latter. We are the
lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and
at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag
th