The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 2

our gracious
sovereign has deigned to brand for the world's contempt as "dupes of
hope purveying to sons of greed." The political philosopher of to-day is
spared the trouble of pointing out the fallacies of republican
government, as the mathematician is spared that of demonstrating the

absurdity of the convergence of parallel lines; yet the ancient
Americans not only clung to their error with a blind, unquestioning
faith, even when groaning under its most insupportable burdens, but
seem to have believed it of divine origin. It was thought by them to
have been established by the god Washington, whose worship, with
that of such dii minores as Gufferson, Jaxon and Lincon (identical
probably with the Hebru Abrem) runs like a shining thread through all
the warp and woof of the stuff that garmented their moral nakedness.
Some stones, very curiously inscribed in many tongues, were found by
the explorer Droyhors in the wilderness bordering the river Bhitt
(supposed by him to be the ancient Potomac) as lately as the reign of
Barukam IV. These stones appear to be fragments of a monument or
temple erected to the glory of Washington in his divine character of
Founder and Preserver of republican institutions. If this tutelary deity
of the ancient Americans really invented representative government
they were not the first by many to whom he imparted the malign secret
of its inauguration and denied that of its maintenance.
Although many of the causes which finally, in combination, brought
about the downfall of the great American republic were in operation
from the beginning--being, as has been said, inherent in the system--it
was not until the year 1995 (as the ancients for some reason not now
known reckoned time) that the collapse of the vast, formless fabric was
complete. In that year the defeat and massacre of the last army of law
and order in the lava beds of California extinguished the final fires of
enlightened patriotism and quenched in blood the monarchical revival.
Thenceforth armed opposition to anarchy was confined to desultory and
insignificant warfare waged by small gangs of mercenaries in the
service of wealthy individuals and equally feeble bands of prescripts
fighting for their lives. In that year, too, "the Three Presidents" were
driven from their capitals, Cincinnati, New Orleans and Duluth, their
armies dissolving by desertion and themselves meeting death at the
hands of the populace.
The turbulent period between 1920 and 1995, with its incalculable
waste of blood and treasure, its dreadful conflicts of armies and more
dreadful massacres by passionate mobs, its kaleidoscopic changes of
government and incessant effacement and redrawing of boundaries of
states, its interminable tale of political assassinations and

proscriptions--all the horrors incident to intestinal wars of a naturally
lawless race--had so exhausted and dispirited the surviving protagonists
of legitimate government that they could make no further head against
the inevitable, and were glad indeed and most fortunate to accept life
on any terms that they could obtain.
But the purpose of this sketch is not bald narration of historic fact, but
examination of antecedent germinal conditions; not to recount
calamitous events familiar to students of that faulty civilization, but to
trace, as well as the meager record will permit, the genesis and
development of the causes that brought them about. Historians in our
time have left little undone in the matter of narration of political and
military phenomena. In Golpek's "Decline and Fall of the American
Republics," in Soseby's "History of Political Fallacies," in Holobom's
"Monarchical Renasence," and notably in Gunkux's immortal work,
"The Rise, Progress, Failure and Extinction of The Connected States of
America" the fruits of research have been garnered, a considerable
harvest. The events are set forth with such conscientiousness and
particularity as to have exhausted the possibilities of narration. It
remains only to expound causes and point the awful moral.
To a delinquent observation it may seem needless to point out the
inherent defects of a system of government which the logic of events
has swept like political rubbish from the face of the earth, but we must
not forget that ages before the inception of the American republics and
that of France and Ireland this form of government had been discredited
by emphatic failures among the most enlightened and powerful nations
of antiquity: the Greeks, the Romans, and long before them (as we now
know) the Egyptians and the Chinese. To the lesson of these failures
the founders of the eighteenth and nineteenth century republics were
blind and deaf. Have we then reason to believe that our posterity will
be wiser because instructed by a greater number of examples? And is
the number of examples which they will have in memory really greater?
Already the instances of China, Egypt, Greece and Rome are almost
lost in the mists of antiquity; they