Half-Hours with the Idiot. Bangs John Kendrick
one administration, anyhow."
"A nightmare of that kind erected in the capital city of a friendly power would be just cause for war to the knife!" said Mr. Brief.
"Well, I have an alternative proposition," said the Idiot, "and I am not sure that it isn't far better than the other. Why not erect a Statue of Liberty in every capital abroad, an exact reproduction of that monumental affair in New York Harbor, and let our Ambassadors live in them? They tell me there's as much room inside Liberty's skirts as there is in any ordinary ten-story apartment house, and there is no reason why it should not be utilized. My suggestion would be to have all the offices of the Embassies in the pedestals, and let the Ambassador and his family live in the overskirt. There'd be plenty of room left higher up in the torso for guest chambers, and in the uplifted arm for nurseries for the ambassadorial children, and the whole could be capped with a magnificent banquet hall on the rim of the torch, at the base of the brazen flame."
"A plan worthy of the gigantic intellect that conceived it," smiled the Doctor. "But how would you have this thing furnished, Mr. Idiot? Would that be done by the Ambassadors themselves, or would the President have to call a special session of Congress to tackle the job?"
"I was coming to that," said the Idiot. "It has occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to have forty-eight rooms in the statue, each named after one of our American States, and then leave it to each State to furnish its own room. This would lend a pleasing variety to the inside of the building that could hardly fail to interest the visitor, and would give the foreigners a very clear insight into our resources along lines of interior decorations. Think of the Massachusetts Room, for example – a fine old horse-hair mahogany sofa in one corner; a rosewood highboy off in another; an old-fashioned four-poster bed projecting out into the middle of the room, and a blue china wash-bowl and pitcher on a spindle-legged washstand near by; and on the wall three steel engravings, one showing John Hancock signing the Declaration of Independence, another of Charles Sumner preaching emancipation, and a third showing Billy Sunday trying to sweep back the waves of a damp Boston from the sand dunes of a gradually drying Commonwealth. Then the Michigan room would be a corker, lavishly filled with antique furniture fresh from Grand Rapids, and a bronze statuette of Henry Ford at each end of the mantelpiece for symmetry's sake, the ceiling given over to a symbolical painting entitled The Confusion of Bacchus, reproducing scenes in Detroit when announcement was made that the good old State had voted for grape-juice as the official tipple. Missouri's room could be made a thing of beauty and a joy forever, with its lovely wall paper showing her favorite sons, Dave Francis and Champ Clark alternately, separated by embossed hound-dogs, rampant, done in gilt bronze, and the State motto, Show Me, in red, white, and blue tiles over the fireplace. Really I can't imagine anything more expressive of all-America than that would be. Florida could take the Palm Room; New York the rather frigid and formal white and gold reception room; Maine as the leading cold-water State of the Union could furnish the bathrooms; California could provide a little cafeteria affair for a quick lunch in mission style, and owing to her pre-eminence in literature, the library could be turned over to Indiana with every assurance that if there were not books enough to go round, any one of her deservedly favorite sons, from George Ade to George McCutcheon, would write a five-foot shelfful at any time to supply the deficiency.
"Murally speaking, a plan of this sort could be made historically edifying also. Florida could supply a handsome canvas showing Ponce de Leon discovering Palm Beach. In the New Jersey room the Battle of Trenton could be shown, depicting the retreat of Jim Smith, and the final surrender of Democracy to General Wilson. Ohio could emphasize in an appropriate medium the Discovery of the Oil Fields by Mr. Rockefeller. Pennsylvania could herald her glories with a mural painting apotheosizing William Penn and Andrew Carnegie in the act of forging her heart of steel in the fires of immortality, kept burning by a never-ending stream of bonds poured forth from the end of a cornucopia by Fortune herself. An heroic figure of Governor Blease defying the lightning would come gracefully from South Carolina, and Rhode Island, always a most aristocratic little State, could emphasize the descent of some of her favorite sons from Darwin's original inspiration by a frieze depicting a modern tango party at Newport, in which the preservation of the type, and a possible complete reversion thereto, should be made imperishably obvious to all beholders.
"Then, to make the thing consistent throughout, the homes of Ambassadors having been standardized, Congress should order a standard uniform for her representatives abroad. This would settle once and for all the vexed question as to what an Ambassador shall wear when presented to King This, or Emperor That, or the Ponkapog of Thingumbob. I think it ought to be a definitely established principle that every nation should be permitted to choose its own official dud, but not the duds of others. There is no reason in the world why the King of England should be permitted to dictate the style of garments an American Ambassador shall wear. Suppose he ordered him to attend a five o'clock tea clad in yellow pajamas trimmed with red-plush fringe and gold tassels emerging from green rosettes? It would be enough to set the eagle screaming and to justify the sending of a Commission of Protest headed by Mr. Bryan over to London to slap Mr. Lloyd George on the wrist. Nor should the Kaiser be permitted to say how an American representative shall dress when calling upon him, compelling him to appear perhaps in a garb entirely unsuited to his style of beauty – something like the uniform of a glorified White Wing, for instance, decorated with peacock feathers, and wearing an alpine hat with a stuffed parrot lying flat on its back on the peak, on his head. That sort of thing does not gee with our pretensions. We are a free and independent nation, and it is time to assert our independence of the sartorial shackles those foreign potentates would fasten upon us. Let the fiat go forth that hereafter all American Ambassadors wheresoever accredited shall wear a long blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons, and forty-eight stars, lit by electricity from a small battery concealed in the pistol pocket, appliquéd on the tails; red and white-striped doeskin trousers, skin tight, held down by straps under the boots; and an embroidered waist-coat, showing a couple of American eagles standing on their hind legs and facing the world with the defiant cry of We Pluribus Us; the whole topped off with a bell-crowned, fuzzy beaver hat, made of silver-gray plush, which shall never be removed in the presence of anybody, potentate or peasant, plutocrat or Cook tourist. If in addition to these items the Ambassador were compelled to wear a long, yellow chin whisker, it would be just the liverest livery that ever came down the pike of Brummelian splendor. It would emphasize the presence of the American Ambassador wherever he went, and make the effete nations of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Pan America sit up and take notice."
"Doubtless," said the Bibliomaniac, rising impatiently. "And do you suppose the President could find any self-respecting American in or out of jail who would be willing to wear such a costume as that?"
"Well," said the Idiot, "of course some of 'em might object, but I'll bet you four dollars and eighty-seven cents' worth of doughnuts against a Chautauqua rain check that any man who offered you seventeen thousand five hundred dollars a year for wearing those duds without having the money to back the offer up would find your name at the head of the list of his preferred creditors in less than three shakes of a lamb's tail!"
II
AS TO THE FAIR SEX
"I observe with pain," said the Idiot, as he placed the Bibliomaniac's pat of butter under his top waffle, "that there is a more or less acrimonious dispute going on as to the propriety of admitting women to the Hall of Fame. The Immortals already in seem to think that immortality belongs exclusively to the male order of human beings, and that the word is really 'Him-mortality', and decline to provide even a strap for the ladies to hang on in the cars leading to the everlasting heights, all of which causes me to rejoice that I am not an Immortal myself. If the one durable joy in life, the joy that neither crocks nor fades, association with the fair sex, a diversion which age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite variety, is something an Immortal must get along without, it's me for the tall timbers of fameless existence. I rejoice that I am but a plain, common-garden, everyday mortal thing, ready for shipment, f. o. b., for the last terminal station on the road to that well-known Irish settlement, O'Blivion."
"I didn't know that you were such an admirer of the fair sex, Mr. Idiot," said the Doctor. "Many years' residence in a refined home for single gentlemen like this would seem to indicate that the allurements of feminine society were not for you."
"Quite