Those were our hereditary principals you fled from. Even worse.
Of course, we discovered that you get an occasional good king with sound ministers; but so often, his son would be the egotistical mad one, with a court full of sycophants keen on personal power or enrichment.
And at worst the son would be a fervent believer in the divine right of kings: whereby the leader can do as he wants, without hindrance from tedious elected bodies or the courts. Why, he'd even appoint his own judges to do as they wanted, and declare that the king could act as he knew best without restraint of Parliament. And such a king knew, knew, that God was on his side, even when vain foreign military excursions went awry.
Gosh, history has nothing to teach us today.
How fortunate we are that nowhere except North Korea and a few Arab despotisms are governed by someone ruling because their father ruled before them, and every other state has a leader elected as the best choice of his or her supporting faction without his parentage being significant.
Because, you know, if we've learnt nothing else from a monarchy, it's that even if the first one in a dynasty is pretty useful his children tend to just squander all their inheritance. |
