"Alas, it is sad enough that anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,--for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that shams of any kind, especially that Sham Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may _cease_. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly, a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,--all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue saleable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis? 'The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would destroy shams.' "Even so. To such depth have _I_, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got;--almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that this was the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him."