The modern age, with its inconvenient questions and its bold speech, arrives. Commerce develops, and the palace and cathedral disappear, in the forest of soaring buildings. When the roofs of the new commerce and the new commoner rise to a level with the roof of the palace or the cathedral, when men are no longer overshadowed by the old powers, the imagination is released. The divine right of kings goes in a fury of revolutionary flame: kings must henceforth rule by human right and answer at a human tribunal, which is more exacting and alert than the old tribunal. Yet the power of the dead tradition is amazing. In England men still bow reverently when the king addresses them as "my subjects" and talks of "my empire": still crown every entertainment, spiritual or gastronomic, with fervent aspirations which would lead an ill-informed spectator to imagine that they regarded the king's health as mystically connected with the health of the nation: still describe bishops and the heads of families which have been sufficiently long idle and wealthy as their "lords."
These archæological survivals are, no doubt, innocuous, if irritating. The more serious feature is that they help to make so many people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which clogs and dulls the fire of the nation's life. The nineteenth century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. Luckily, certain nations had won the right to do a good deal of talking before the king came to a decision, or the right to hold Parliaments, and Europe generally adopted this model. The Parliament House now towered upward in the city, and it did the real business of directing the nation's affairs. The king became a kind of grand seal for the measures enacted by Parliament. Some nations, the number of which is increasing, regarded the seal as a costly and avoidable luxury, and abolished it: some kept the king, with all his stately language and pretty robes and sparkling jewellery, and abolished the "lords": some kept the king and the lords, but deprived them of real power. The English nation, which is famous for its common-sense, its audacity, and its ability, belongs to the last group. It invented that remarkable phrase, "self-government": which ingeniously preserves the fiction that someone has a right to govern other people, yet conciliates the modern spirit by intimating that the people really govern their governors.