A Declining Product

A German professor, with that passion for exactitude which characterizes the species, finds that 278 persons have been divested of royalty in some fashion or other since the armistice was signed.

The fact is more important than you may think. There can be snobbery without kings. Witness the United States, which produces the article on a lavish scale, as the society columns of nearly all our daily organs of democratic opinion so eloquently testify. But there cannot be a king without snobbery. Not even the meagerest German princeling, fourth in line of succession to a reline for which no average Iowa farmer would trade his fat acres without boot, could exist a day without it. Taken out of the atmosphere of snobbery, like a fish out of water, he would simply give three gasps, two flops and expire. To talk about a democratic king is to talk the sheerest nonsense. There could no more be a democratic king than a live dead man. The terms are mutually exclusive. A king implies snobs.

Snobbery, of course, is only an annoyance. So are bed-bugs and boils; but normal people will take great pains to avoid them. The animal's organs adapt themselves to its environment, and kingship stands for the environment that produced snobbery. Once developed, the organ outlives its causes. There is your vermiform appendix, for example. So snobbery will outlive kings. Probably we shall have our society columns for a good while. But snobbery is on the declining hand. --SATURDAY EVENING POST.