The serenity of the golf day for Donald Trump the other day was cruelly disturbed by the sight of the homeless.  He has ordered in the National Guard. 

This sad episode calls to mind a passage from Carlyle, The French Revolution about another absolute ruler. King Louis XV.

Louis, we say, was not so happy; but he did what he could.  He would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind.  It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too.  Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and ask “how many new graves there were today,” though it gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms.  We can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he met, at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged Peasant with a coffin: ‘For whom?’—It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. ‘What did he die of?’— ‘Of hunger:’—the King gave his steed the spur.