单项选择题

In a few days, Prince William, the 28-year-old heir-but-one to the British throne, will marry Catherine Middleton, a 29-year-old university chum whose parents run a successful business selling party goods. In central London the machinery of state flummery is in motion. Along the Mall, Union flags are being hung from crown-topped poles, palace railings gleam with fresh paint and plume-helmeted horse guards rehearse in the parks. A grandstand for television anchors has been erected opposite Buckingham Palace. hours of special programming loom.
The mood of the British public is harder to gauge. The press is full of dresses and hats, but also of opinion polls saying that barely a half of the British are interested in the wedding, and only a third are certain to watch it on television. Councils report a north-south divide in applications to hold street parties---and far fewer overall than when Prince William’s parents wed in 1981.
What is going on Most simply, experience has taught the British that to cheer a royal wedding today is to risk feeling a chump tomorrow. Mter decades of royal divorces and marital wars conducted by tabloid leak or tell-all book, sighing over a new princely union requires a leap of faith.
Perhaps, optimists might also hope, the British feel a twinge of collective remorse over the short, pitilessly scrutinized life of Prince William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps the public simply want to give two young people some space.
Optimists make a plausible case that Prince William will thrive if he embodies his mother’s impatience with protocol and empathy with suffering, and learns from the middle-class warmth of Miss Middleton’s childhood, or the rise of her mother’s family from poverty only two generations ago. A big dose of normality, it is agreed, will do the monarchy wonders.
Bagehot, a pessimist, disagrees. On paper, the monarchy looks pretty safe: support for a republic remains Constant at about 20%. But the question--Do you want to keep the monarchy --is too crude. The queen and her offspring are different things at once: they are "a family on the throne", to quote the original Bagehot, embodying national (and Commonwealth) unity and continuity. Though the job description has evolved to include displays of human emotion, being a monarch still removes the queen far from normal experience. After nearly 60 years, she might as well be a unicorn or other mythical beast. At the same time, the royal family does touch the real world, albeit the part of it inhabited by what remains of the landed upper classes: a life of moors and deer-stalking, of summers under Scottish rain, dogs and horses, the church, the armed forces, the same few boarding schools and the right sort of nightclubs. That is more perilous territory: the British, in the main, dislike such people.
Give the British a reason to resent each other, and they will seize it with happiness. Prince William’s mother used the royal family’s fustiness as a weapon in her war against them; that marital fight ruined lives. By the time of its tragic ending, the British public were left queasy, cynical and divided. Miss Middleton may well be a fine person, but if her life’s journey pinpoints Prince William’s place in society too closely, she could end up harming him.
The reason why the pessimist dislikes the monarchy is that ______.