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tradition does
not come to flower in the open American air; it is potted and grown
under glass; and can be carried out-doors only under special conditions.
The American must still come to England for the realization of certain
social ideals towards which we may be now straining, but which do not
yet enjoy general acceptance. The reader who knows New York has but
to try and fancy its best, or even its better, society dispersing itself on
certain grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or afternoon; or,
on some week-day evening, leaving its equipages along the drives and
strolling out over the herbage; or receiving in its carriages the greetings
of acquaintance who make their way in and out among the wheels.
Police and populace would join forces in their several sorts to spoil a
spectacle which in Hyde Park appeals, in high degree, to the aesthetic
sense, and which might stimulate the historic imagination to feats of
agreeable invention if one had that sort of imagination.
The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society which we have
not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably
never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be
public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its specific
events will remain within walls. It could not manifest itself outside
without being questioned, challenged, denied; and upon reflection there
might appear reasons why it is well so.

III
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
We are quite as domestic as the English, but with us the family is of the
personal life, while with them it is of the general life, so that when their
domesticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one feels it
strange. One has read of something like this without the sense of it
which constantly penetrates one in London. One must come to England
in order to realize from countless little occasions, little experiences,

how entirely English life, public as well as private, is an affair of
family. We know from our reading how a comparatively few families
administer, if they do not govern, but we have still to learn how the
other families are apparently content to share the form in which
authority resides, since they cannot share the authority. At the very top
I offer the conjecture towards the solution of that mystery which
constantly bewilders the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty--is,
of course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the American is
that it is revered because it is the royal family. But possibly a truer
interpretation of the fact would be that it is dear and sacred to the vaster
British public because it is the royal family. A bachelor king could
hardly dominate the English imagination like a royal husband and
father, even if his being a husband and father were not one of the
implications of that tacit Constitution in whose silence English power
resides. With us, family has less and less to do with society, even; but
with the English it has more and more to do, since the royal family is
practically without political power, and not only may, but almost must,
devote itself to society. It goes and comes on visits to other
principalities and powers; it opens parliaments; it lays corner- stones
and presides at the dedication of edifices of varied purpose; it receives
deputations and listens to addresses; it holds courts and levees; it
reviews regiments and fleets, and assists at charity entertainments and
at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races; it is in constant
demand for occasions requiring exalted presences for their prosperity.
These events seem public, and if they were imaginable of a democracy
like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order of English
things they are social, they are domestic, they are from one family to
every other family directly or indirectly; the king is for these ends not
more a royalty than the rest of his family, and for the most part he acts
as a family man; his purely official acts are few. Things that in a
republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births, christenings, deaths,
and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect
royalty, of public and national concern, and it would not be easy to
show how one royal act differed from another in greater or less
publicity.
If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willingness to generalize

from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or
missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some
phases of functions exalted far beyond the range of republican
experiences or means of comparison. In the