Cordwood Part 13

As it is now, three or four allied powers ask a man to leave his business and squat on a cold, hard throne for a mere pittance, and then just as he begins to let his whiskers grow and learns to dodge a big porcelain bomb those same allied powers jump on top of him all spraddled out and ask him for his deposition. That is no way to treat an amateur monarch who is trying to do right.

You can see that unless you stand by each other the thrones of Europe will soon be empty, and every two-dollar a day hotel in America will have an heir apparently to the throne for a head-waiter, with a coronet put on his clothes with a rubber stamp and a loaded scepter up his sleeve.

If you want to rear your children to love and respect the monarchy industry you must afford them better protection. I say this as a man who may not live to be over one hundred years of age, and with my feet thus settling into the boggy sh.o.r.es of time let me beg of you, monarchs and monarchesses, to make your calling an honorable one. Teach your children and their children to respect the business by which their parents earned their bread. Show them it is honorable to empire a country if they do it right. Teach them that to do right is better than to fraudulently turn a jack from the bottom of the pack. Teach them it is better to be a popular straight out-and-out artisan king who is sincere about it than to be a monarch who dares not leave his throne night or day for fear that somebody will put a number of bombs under it or criticise him in the papers.