It will make a stir, it surely will, these crucifixions. Persons will begin to ask again, as now and then in times past, how I can hope to win and keep the respect of the human race if I continue to give up my life to murder and pillage. [_Scornfully_] When have they heard me say I wanted the respect of the human race? Do they confuse me with the common herd? do they forget that I am a king? What king has valued the respect of the human race? I mean deep down in his private heart. If they would reflect, they would know that it is impossible that a king should value the respect of the human race. He stands upon an eminence and looks out over the world and sees multitudes of meek human things worshiping the persons, and submitting to the oppressions and exactions, of a dozen human things who are in no way better or finer than themselves—made on just their own pattern, in fact, and out of the same quality of mud. When it _talks_, it is a race of whales; but a king knows it for a race of tadpoles. Its history gives it away. If men were really _men_, how could a Czar be possible? and how could I be possible? But we _are_ possible; we are quite safe; and with God’s help we shall continue the business at the old stand. It will be found that the race will put up with us, in its docile immemorial way. It may pull a wry face now and then, and make large talk, but it will stay on its knees all the same. [Illustration: “Made on just their own pattern” ] Making large talk is one of its specialties. It works itself up, and froths at the mouth, and just when you think it is going to throw a brick,—it heaves a poem! Lord, what a race it is! A CZAR—1905 “A pasteboard autocrat; a despot out of date; A fading planet in the glare of day; A flickering candle in the bright sun’s ray, Burnt to the socket; fruit left too late, High on a blighted bough, ripe till it’s rotten. By God forsaken and by time forgotten, Watching the crumbling edges of his lands, A spineless god to whom dumb millions pray, From Finland in the West to far Cathay, Lord of a frost-bound continent he stands, Her seeming ruin his dim mind appalls, And in the frozen stupor of his sleep He hears dull thunders, pealing as she falls, And mighty fragments dropping in the deep.”[2] Footnote 2: B. H. Nadal, in _New York Times_.