was to them the divinely appointed symbol of the unity of their country. In defending him, they defended it. It did not interfere, that instinct of loyalty, with their mature manhood, freedom, independence. They knew that if royalty were indeed God's ordinance, it had its duties as well as its rights. And when their kings broke the law, they changed their kings. But a king they must have, for their own sakes; not merely for the sake of the nation's security and peace, but for the sake of their own self-respect. They felt, those old forefathers of ours, that loyalty was not a degrading, but an ennobling influence; that a free man can give up his independence without losing it; that--as the example of that mighty German army has just shown an astounded world--independence is never more called out than by subordination; and that a free man never feels himself so free as when obeying those whom the laws of his country have set over him; an able man never feels himself so able as when he is following the lead of an abler man than himself. And what if, as needs must happen at whiles, the sovereign were not a man, but a woman or a child? Then was added to loyalty in the hearts of our forefathers, and of many another nation in Europe, an instinct even deeper, and tenderer, and more unselfish--the instinct of chivalry; and the widowed queen, or the prince, became to them a precious jewel committed to their charge by the will of their forefathers and the providence of God; an heirloom for which they were responsible to God, and to their forefathers, and to their children after them, lest their names should be stained to all future generations by the crime of baseness toward the weak.