"I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of
the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.
Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it
differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it,
something worth perserving, something even good and high and fine, when
properly 'modified,' something entitling it to protection from the club
of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It seems a most
strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man is a
reasoning being. If a house is afire, we reason confidently that it is
the first comer's plain duty to put the fire out in any way he can --
drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use any and all means to
stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of the city. What is the
Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of a city of eighty
millions of inhabitants?Yet instead of extinguishing him, together with
his nest  and system, the liberation-parties are all anxious to merely
cool him down a little and keep him.

"It seems to me that this is illogical -- idiotic, in fact."

That what's MT thinks of despots. And as for ad hominem, you don't know
what ad hominem means until you have tried to present a rational
conservative view in a group of academics.

D