"Count Estevan."
--The career of "Count" Estevan in this country is but one of a long series of impostures which have been passed off upon the gullible and title-worshiping republicans of this continent from the earliest establishment of their independence. Except that this ex-valet of Bohemia appeared among us during a war, and availed himself of the facilities which his position afforded to collect the materials of doing us public mischief, there is nothing to distinguish his case from that of the other discarded serving men and lackeys who have so often figured in the American social firmament as stars of the first magnitude. We are not disposed to exhaust all our anathemas on these adventurers from European kitchens as the vilest impostors and humbugs in the world. We do not think them in fact as great impostors as the flunkeys and tuft-hunters in America, who, professing to be republicans, humble themselves at the feet of every foreign celebrity, and actually glory in their shame.The people of the United States, in separating themselves from Great Britain, and in decreeing that there should be no order and titles of nobility in the Republic, did their best, no doubt, to testify their opposition to aristocracy; but they could not change human nature. --Aristocracies the world will have, either of genuine gold or gilded copper; either of ancient birth, or of education, or of mushroom wealth. That to which we object is the hypocrisy which professes to hate all aristocracy, and is the most obsequious, servile, and soulless worshipper of aristocracy in all the world.--In this respect, as in many others, the people of the United States were the greatest humbugs in all Christendom.--Not in Europe itself can greater obsequiousness be found to rank and title. We are afraid that our own country is not entirely free from the disgraceful weakness. In the name of all that is manly and honest, let our institutions be either faithful outward signs of the inner man, or the inner man conform to the outward sign. If we hold in such ecstatic delight everything that savors of title, why not establish titles of our own — make Dukes, Earls, and Counts of some of our old families — and have the name as well as the thing that we so pine after?
