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A Sojourn With Royalty (October 26, 1865) (13 pages)
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Page: of 13
Sacramento Daily Union, Thursday, October 26, 1865, p. 6
A SOJOURN WITH ROYALTY; OR, A CLAIM TO DISTINCTION.
BY OLD BLOCK. [Alonzo Delano]
Your Majesty-My Lord Duke Your grace. Lord! what graceful and majestic
expressions! How our republican and plebeian souls throb at such, glorious sounds!
Aristocracy, how noble'. Mudsills, how low! Even shoddy greatness, without brains,, how
much Better than the greatness of intellect, of education, of mind!The aristocracy of
wealth, of running, of good luck, of diamond pins and empty heads, is ennobling in
itself’, and commands a premium in the fashionable market, and then, O, if one has come
in contact with the royalty of crowned heads, how happy! If they have rubbed against the
coat-sleeve of a King, or brushed against the mantle of a Queen, it is a passport to high
society. The great Duke Gwin has basked beneath royal smiles and reveled in royal halls.
Hunter and Mason have tasted the perfumed air of royal Courts, and how great they
seem .to our shoddyites who have grown sudddenly rich-no matter how-by cunning, by
stealing, or by good luck! The trouble with us is that the masses will not be convinced of
the beauties of aristocracy.
They somehow seem to think that diamond-pins and rich quartz ledges do not always
entitle men to govern or to establish rules in society, and that intellect and merit have
some claims to consideration, and that, although a man may be sharp, or lucky -in moneymaking, he may lack brains for political economy or the control of public affairs in which
the happiness of the millions are interested. Unless taught by foreign education, our
mudsills forget to pull off the hat and bend the knee to our self-constituted aristocrats. In
their innocence they are weak enough to consider that the men who a few hays ago were
working in the same gulch with themselves, clothed in the same mud-stained habiliments,
with hands as hard and faces as sunburnt, are no better qualified to establish rules and
grades of society because they have struck a lead, and now wear ruffled shirts instead of
woolen wrappers, than they are, and that the fact of their having made a lucky strike
gives them no more intellect, no more right to control public opinion, than when they
were delving in the shaft or behind the counter ; and, dear reader, I think thev are right,
by heavens ! Yet too many of this class arrogate to themselves extraordinary powers and
unusual talents. They act upon the homely adage that "Money makes the mare go,"' only