and the other project was, to get a decree issued by and
by, commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced,
and given to men and women alike - at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and
to all mothers who, at middle age, should be found to know nearly as much as
their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about
my own age - that is to say, forty - and I believed that in that time I could
easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an
event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world - a
rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed. The result to be
a Republic. Well, I may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think
of it: I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first President
myself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out.
    Clarence was with me, as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way.
His idea was a Republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal
family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. He believed
that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could
ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings
were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats
would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family,
they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same vices,
the same fidelities and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up
shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and
never know it, and they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as
sound a divine right as any other royal house, and Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom
XIV by the grace of God King, would sound as well as it would when applied to
the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. »And as a rule,« said he, in his neat
modern English, »the character of these cats would be considerably above the
character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to
the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its
monarch's. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and
harmless cats