I was not expecting the Monarchy to come in my own time, nor in my children’s time, nor at any period which one might forecast with anything approaching definiteness. It might come soon, it might come late; it might come in a century, it might be delayed two centuries, even three. But it would come.
…
The idea was, Republics are impermanent; in time they perish, and in most cases stay under the sod, but the overthrown Monarchy gets back in the saddle again by and by. The idea was—in other and familiar words,—history repeats itself: whatever has been the rule in history may be depended upon to remain the rule.
Not because, in the case under present consideration, men would deliberately desire the destruction of their Republic and plan it out, but because circumstances which they create without suspecting what they are doing will by and by compel that destruction—to their grief and dismay. My notion was, that in some near or some distant day, circumstances would so shape themselves, unnoticed by the people, as to make it possible for some ambitious idol of the nation to upset the Republic and build his throne out of its ruins; and that then history would stand ready to back him.
But all this was thirty-five years ago. It seems curious, now, that I should have been dreaming dreams about a Future Monarchy, and never suspecting that the Monarchy was already present and the Republic a thing of the past. Yet that was the case. The Republic in name remained, but the Republic in fact was gone.
… Our Monarch is more powerful, more arbitrary, more autocratic than any in Europe, its White House commands are not under restraint of law or custom or the Constitution, it can ride down the Congress as the Czar cannot ride down the Duma. It can concentrate and augment power at the Capital by despoiling the States of their reserved rights, and by the voice of a Secretary of State it has indicated its purpose to do this. It can pack the Supreme Court with judges friendly to its ambitions, and it has threatened—by the voice of a Secretary of State—to do this. In many and admirably conceived ways it has so formidably intrenched itself and so tightened its grip upon the throne that I think it is there for good.
By a system of extraordinary tariffs it has created a number of giant corporations, in the interest of a few rich men, and by most ingenious and persuasive reasoning has convinced the multitudinous and grateful unrich that the tariffs were instituted in their interest! Next, the Monarchy proclaims itself the enemy of its child the monopoly, and lets on that it wants to destroy that child. But it is wary and judicious, and never says anything about attacking the monopolies at their life-source—the tariffs. It thoughtfully puts off that assault till “after election.” A thousand years after, is quite plainly what it means, but the people do not know that. Our Monarchy takes no backward step; it moves always forward, always toward its ultimate and now assured goal, the real thing.
I was not expecting to live to see it reach it, but a recent step—the newest advance-step and the startlingest—has encouraged me. It is this: formerly our Monarchy went through the form of electing its Shadow by the voice of the people; but now the Shadow has gone and appointed the succession-Shadow!
I judge that that strips off about the last rag that was left upon our dissolving wax-figure Republic. It was the last one in the case of the Roman Republic.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1908
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