“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce--never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap. “Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat--humor is no by-product of the brewery---but the merriment that comes when common sense has been vindicated by ridicule. “Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So, when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass on the face of the earth--Bill Hohenzollern. “In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere of hell--hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain--the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit.