Catalogue on request. J. & C. Fischer 164 Fifth Ave., bet. 21st and 22d Sts., and 905 YOSE PIANOS have been established over 50 YEARS. By our system of pay every family in moderate circumstances can own a VOSE place take old instruments in exchange and deliver the new plane lat home free of expense. Write for Catalogue D and explanatio VOS SONSubh £0.. 160 Boylston Street, Boston, Mast NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DLXXX. MARCH, 1905. THE CZAR'S SOLILOQUY. BY MARK TWAIN. After the Czar's morning bath it is his habit to meditate an hour before dressing himself.-London Times Correspondence. [Viewing himself in the pier-glass.] Naked, what am I? A lank, skinny, spider-legged libel on the image of God! Look at the waxwork head-the face, with the expression of a melonthe projecting ears-the knotted elbows-the dished breast-the knife-edged shins-and then the feet, all beads and joints and bone-sprays, an imitation X-ray photograph! There is nothing imperial about this, nothing imposing, impressive, nothing to invoke awe and reverence. Is it this that a hundred and forty million Russians kiss the dust before and worship? Manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle, which is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately, none knows better than I: it is my clothes. Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. Nobody could tell me from a parson, a barber, a dude. Then who is the real Emperor of Russia? My clothes. There is no other. As Teufelsdröckh suggested, what would man be-what would any man be-without his clothes? As soon as one stops and thinks over that proposition, one realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely VOL. CLXXX.-NO. 580. 21 Copyright, 1905, by TH NORTH American Review PUBLISHING COMPANY, All rights Reserved. make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing. Titles-another artificiality-are a part of his clothing. They and the dry-goods conceal the wearer's inferiority and make him seem great and a wonder, when at bottom there is nothing remarkable about him. They can move a nation to fall on its knees and sincerely worship an Emperor who, without the clothes and the title, would drop to the rank of the cobbler and be swallowed up and lost sight of in the massed multitude of the inconsequentials; an Emperor who, naked in a naked world, would get no notice, excite no remark, and be heedlessly shouldered and jostled like any other uncertified stranger, and perhaps offered a kopek to carry somebody's gripsack; yet an Emperor who, by the sheer might of those artificialities clothes and a title can get himself worshipped as a deity by his people, and at his pleasure and unrebuked can exile them, hunt them, harry them, destroy them, just as he would with so many rats if the accident of birth had furnished him a calling better suited to his capacities than empering. It is a stupendous force-that which resides in the allconcealing cloak of clothes and title; they fill the onlooker with awe; they make him tremble; yet he knows that every hereditary regal dignity commemorates a usurpation, a power illegitimately acquired, an authority conveyed and conferred by persons who did not own it. For monarchs have been chosen and elected by aristocracies only: a Nation has never elected one. There is no power without clothes. It is the power that governs the human race. Strip its chiefs to the skin, and no State could be governed; naked officials could exercise no authority; they would look (and be) like everybody else commonplace, inconsequential. A policeman in plain clothes is one man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it. In naked tribes of savages the kings wear some kind of rag or decoration which they make sacred to themselves and allow no one else to wear. The king of the great Fan tribe wears a bit of leopard-skin on his shoulderit is sacred to royalty; the rest of him is perfectly naked. With |