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In the present state of the greater part of the civilized monarchies of Europe, the rent of all the lands in the country, managed as they probably would be, if they all belonged to one proprietor, would scarce, perhaps, amount to the ordinary revenue which they levy upon the people even in peaceable times.
At the moment of the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he is already so strong and so aggressive that his neighbors are obliged, for their own security, to form an alliance with England; this leads him to break down all the old monarchies that are still intact, to conquer Naples, to mutilate Austria the first time, to dismember and cut up Prussia, to mutilate Austria the second time, to manufacture kingdoms for his brothers at Naples, in Holland and in Westphalia.
There has gradually grown up, therefore, in all monarchies, the custom of having a central board of officers of state, whom the king appoints, and who take the general direction of affairs in his stead, except so far as he chooses to interfere. This board, in England, is called the Privy Council. The Privy Council in England is a body of great importance.
RAWLINSON, Ancient Monarchies, vol. i. pp. 100, 101, fourth edition. We know that the Astronomical Canon of Ptolemy begins with the accession of a king of Babylon named Nabonassar, in 747 B.C. M. Fr. LENORMANT thinks that the date in question was chosen by the Alexandrian philosopher because it coincided with the substitution, by that prince, of the solar for the lunar year.
It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.... We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times." But the Mexican war changed Grant's plan of life.
Let us now supplement this estimate of Babylonian influence with another estimate written in our own day, and quoted by one of the most recent historians of Babylonia and Assyria. The estimate in question is that of Canon Rawlinson in his Great Oriental Monarchies.
Two hundred thousand legionaries, and as many more auxiliaries, controlled diverse nations and powerful monarchies. The single province of Syria once boasted of a military force equal in the number of soldiers to that wielded by Tiberius. Twenty-five legions made the conquest of the world, and retained that conquest for five hundred years.
The abolition of absolute monarchies and hereditary aristocracies and their replacement by limited monarchies and republics with various types of representative and popular governments selected by ballot. The replacement of personal tyrannies and autocracies by written constitutions and laws passed by elected parliaments.
And who, with such an example before him, would venture to foretell what changes might be at hand, if the most languid and torpid of monarchies should be dissolved, and if every one of the members which had composed it should enter on an independent existence? To such a dissolution that monarchy was peculiarly liable. The King, and the King alone, held it together.
Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace to cost about five millions itself.
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