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found woefully wanting. The institution of Kingship was vindicated in full day, not as a belated survival or an antiquarian curiosity, but as a supremely capable institution as helpful to the modern man as to his progenitor in the days of Charlemagne.

While this great object-lesson was burning itself with cannon flash and bursting shell into the mind of the nation, the perversity of the House of Lords suddenly compelled Mr. Gladstone to resort to the royal prerogative for the purpose of abolishing Purchase in the Army. Then it was discovered by our Democracy, almost for the first time, that the power of the Crown is a great latent force at the command of the people. The Royal prerogative, and the Royal prerogative alone, can cut the Gordian knot of the rival authority of Lords and Commons. The sceptre of the Sovereign is by our Constitution wielded by the elect of the People. Thus at the same time that the Germans had demonstrated that Kingship was a living reality capable of standing the severest tests, the English suddenly discovered that in their Monarchy they had in reserve an invincible reinforcement for the cause of the People.

When the Destinies decide to do a thing thoroughly, they neglect no means to secure their end, taking as much care about the thrums and tatters as about the warp and woof. Hence it is necessary in this survey of the pilgrimage of a Republican to the Monarchy, to call attention to an incident which, compared with the events just described, partakes of the nature of the ludicrous. It was just at the very turningpoint of the crisis—the watershed between the two systems-that the malicious Fates deemed it fitting to use one who was then a rising Radical politician for the purpose of forcing home to the sober sense of the nation the lesson of recent events. It was my fortune to be present at the Lecture Room, Newcastle-on-Tyne, when Sir Charles Dilke, Bart., M.P., launched his famous diatribe against the Cost of the Crown. The meeting was crowded and enthusiastic. The Lecture Room audiences in those days familiar with the scathing "Impeachment of the House of Brunswick " by Mr. Bradlaugh, revelled in the youthful baronet's elaborate demonstration that Goldsticksin-Waiting were more expensive than footmen, and that the trappings of a constitutional monarchy cost ever so many more pence than the sombre habiliments of the president of a republic. I remember leaving the meeting with a sense of bitter humiliation. To this depth of insane trifling then had sunk the Republican enthusiasm that had flamed heaven high in 1848! Elaborate arithmetical calculations that we might possibly, by dispensing with the Monarchy, save ourselves the cost of an extra pot of beer! Twopence halfpenny per head all round as the inducement to rouse the British nation to an attack upon the Monarchy of Alfred, of the Edwards, of Elizabeth, and of Victoria-the inducement was too ridiculous, and even, if it had been adequate, it would have been unspeakably sordid.

The intrinsic absurdities of the Dilke campaign contributed to swell the force of the opposing current. It became evident that the events of the previous year had taught their lesson. There was no Republican rally in the provinces. The Radicals carped at Royal allowances, desiring, as the Spectator used to say, to keep the Throne, but to drape it in cotton velvet; but even this pinch-penny Republican propaganda dwindled away and died.

Just about this time the finishing stroke was given to the last lingering remnant of the Old Guard of Republicans. In the interviews and articles which in those days used to appear in the press discussing the probable date for the Overthrow of the Monarchy, it was openly said that while the Queen lived nothing would be done. "But mark my words, sir," the Republican apostles would declare, "that young man will never ascend the Throne. It will never be permitted." The reports about the Prince were relied upon as the trump-cards of the Party of the Revolution. "We will

not have this man to reign over us," was an expression heard in many places usually free from the contagion of Republican bias.

Then it was that the opportune illness of the Prince of Wales gave the final blow to the house of cards which the Republicans had been so assiduously building. It sounds very brutal to say it, but there were many who, when the disease first seemed likely to be fatal, were by no means disposed to regret a demise which would deliver the nation from a ruler whom they believed unworthy to be the sovereign of a Christian land. I well remember in those days a stalwart Radical coming into the editorial sanctum of the Northern Echo, and saying, "What are you going to say in your obituary leader?" I said I had not made up my mind. The Prince was not dead yet. "Well," said my visitor, "take my advice, and just print a column blank or with asterisks. Then in the centre print this: 'De mortuis nil nisi bonum.'" So saying my

Radical friend went his way.

The Prince did not die, but we all wrote obituary notices at great length, and had leading articles in type headed "Death of the Prince of Wales." Then, night after night, we went down and waited till the last bulletin came to hand before writing another leader. And I verily believe that the suspense, prolonged for nearly a whole week, with the intense realising sense of all that was involved in the struggle for life that went on in the sick-bed at Sandringham, finally extinguished the last smouldering embers of Republicanism in England. The typhoid fever did more for the Monarchy than the Monarchy had done for itself, and when the solemn thanksgiving was held in St. Paul's for the Prince's recovery, the nation gave thanks not merely for the Prince restored to health, but for the deliverance of the British Monarchy from the danger which had apparently menaced its security.

It was shortly after the recovery of the Prince of Wales that I first saw the Queen. The moment was one when I was suffering the full force of the cruel disillusion that overwhelmed all ardent Radicals after the General Election of 1874. It is difficult to-day to recall the implicit faith with which, after the establishment of household suffrage and the election of the Radical Parliament of 1869, it was believed that the nation had entered upon an era in which such things as Conservative majorities were to be as impossible as the return of the Mastodon. In the North of England this belief was a fixed idea. Mr. Gladstone was not advanced enough for the dwellers between the Tyne and the Tees. He was too tender to the Establishment. He was, even in things political, a Conservative at heart. He was too much given to compromise. But let the people speak, then we should see all this hesitating, half-hearted shilly-shallying swept by the board, and the enfranchised democracy would make short work of all that stood in the way of reform ! The working classes were sound at heart. The mere suggestion of a Conservative working man was hailed with derisive laughter. An appeal to the constituencies was always in our idea, in those deluded days, to be to the Liberal party like the reinvigorating contact between the brawn Antæus and Mother Earth. When Mr. Gladstone dissolved Parliament in the early months of 1874, we all believed that he had taken a short cut to certain victory. So far as the North was concerned, we were right. We knew our own people. The county of Durham in the fell hour of Conservative reaction returned an unbroken phalanx of thirteen Radical members to the New Parliament.

But elsewhere! To this hour I cannot recall without pain the memory of that overwhelming disappointment. The return of Mr. Disraeli to power at the head of a Conservative majority shattered everything at one fell blow. It seemed as if the underpinning of the world had given way, as if the sun had reversed its course through the sky.

Where then was our faith in the people? What had become of our fond

confidence in the Democracy? What could be thought of the Sovereign Electorate which had elected such a man as Disraeli to rule over them? Sick and sad at heart, I was pondering these questions when, in a holiday taken after the General Election, I came to Windsor and saw the Queen.

I saw her at Windsor Railway Station, and was not impressed. I was not in my idealising humour. My old idol had fallen shattered, but the ruins rendered impossible the installation of a new idol in the vacant shrine. The familiar scene, the small crowd, the red carpet, the liveried servants, the little figure in black—"not quite so tall as my wife"-walking slowly across the platform to the carriage into which she disappeared from view-that was all. "So that was the Queen! "Like the pussy cat of the nursery rhyme I had been to London and had seen the Queen—and thought nothing of it. But next Sunday at the Congregational Church in Windsor I heard the minister pray for the Queen and all the Royal Family, not as if they were a coat-of-arms, but as if they were living human beings, friends and neighbours of all of us. I remember feeling as if for the first time I realised the personality of the Queen as a living woman.

Republican enthusiasm was sick unto death. The Parisian Commune had burnt up the faith that might have inspired the French Republic. Across the Atlantic the monstrous peculation of Tammany obscured the fair ideal of the men of the Mayflower. At home, what could be thought of a democracy that had just made the Barabbas choice? But I was far from caring much for the Monarchy, and any nascent unconscious faith I might have had in its possibilities of usefulness was rudely tried by the policy of Disraeli. The alteration of the royal title began it, and the sickening orgie of Jingoism ended it. The detestation which Lord Beaconsfield inspired in the Gladstonians in those days was like nothing else in our time. The early Radicals hated Castlereagh as much; they could not hate him worse. To our thinking Disraeli had tarnished the Crown, disgraced the country, betrayed the cause of humanity in the East, embarked on wanton wars, and, to crown all, had made the very name of Imperialism to stink in the nostrils of sane and sober Englishmen. And through that discreditable chapter of British history the Queen was paraded as the especial friend of the Evil Minister. From whence sprang "Verax" pamphlets and newspaper articles innumerable, to which, mayhap, I in my small way contributed my full share.

But the blight passed. Lord Beaconsfield fell to rise no more, and the evil taint of his Administration lingered but for a short space round the Throne. Within a few months of the formation of the Gladstone Administration, I was in London, and what followed can be told in a few sentences. The nearer I came to the centre and heart of the Administration, the more closely I was able to see the actual workings of the executive government, the more I learnt to appreciate the inestimable advantage of having in the very innermost sanctuary of the Empire a human being, head of a Family which will not pass with an adverse election, with whom in all the graver affairs of State Ministers must take council before they act. I realised more clearly than ever before how the security, the continuity, and the prosperity of Britain depended much less upon the politicians and much more upon the Permanents, the Permanent Family above and the Permanent Services below. When I went abroad, and especially when I visited the Great Republic of my earlier ideals, I realised as I had never done before the enormous advantage of having the national unity and our Imperial greatness embodied in a Person who is carefully trained for that position from the cradle, and who in attaining it is not compelled to make intense political enemies of one half of the nation. To have created a centre of equilibrium in the midst of all the forces which surge and sway hither and thither in the turmoil and strain of modern life, to have made this central point the source of all honour and the

symbol of all dominion, and to have secured it at once from the strife of tongues and the conflict of parties, without at the same time endangering the liberties of the subject or the supremacy of law-this, indeed, I have learned to regard as one of the most signal achievements of our race.

Nor was that the only cause for a change of sentiment, which is important merely because of the unimportance of the individual who is thus narrating his pilgrimage from Republicanism to Monarchy. If I had been any one exceptional either by birth, education, or opportunity, these confessions would have been less interesting. It is just because I was an ordinary, average English boy, born in a remote village and reared outside the conventional "loyal" pale, that I have deemed it worth while to begin my series of studies of the Queen and the Queen's reign, by explaining exactly where I stood and where I stand, in the hope that a frank personal survey of the steps which led me from one position to the other may help us to understand the great change that has taken place in the last fifty years in the attitude of the Radical masses sowards the Crown.

No doubt those who have been fervent Monarchists from their cradle will shrug their shoulders and marvel that even an ordinarily stupid Englishman should have taken so long to see what to them was always as plain as a pike-staff and as elementary a proposition as that two and two makes four. But it is enough to reply to their gibes that my standpoint at starting is the standpoint to-day of the majority of those who speak our mother-tongue, and that even within these islands there is still ample field for the missionaries of the Constitutional Monarchy among those who would prefer their Republic without the Crown. The hard wear and tear of actual experience in France and the United States has destroyed the glamour with which in my boyhood the Republic was invested. Social inequality, envy, hatred and all the deadly sins which were once believed to flow from the existence of a throne and an aristocracy, are seen to flourish in more malignant virulence in Republics where there are neither crowns nor nobles. The social order in the old country undoubtedly might be improved in many respects, but in all that differentiates a mob from a family, and an organised social community from a mere predatory horde, it will challenge comparison with the best results that have been attained by the Republics of the Old World and the New. And no small credit for the attainment of this sense of social justice and of ordered content is due to the greatest of all Permanent Civil Servants of the nation, our Sovereign Lady the Queen.

The pride of the parvenu, the insolence of the upstart, the vulgar pretensions of the plutocrat, are abased in the presence of the daughter of a hundred kings, who is nevertheless the friend and neighbour of the Highland cotters, and the simple, unassuming, unaffected lady of Osborne and Windsor. It is something at least to have one family in the land high enough to need to put on no "side," with a position so secure that its princes can dine with dustmen without impairing their social status. Before the altitude of the Throne, dukes and dustmen seem very much on a level. As against the exclusiveness and uppishness of some of our gentry, who often forget to be gentlemen, the Crown is a Democratic engine, and Royalty a reserve of great Democratic power at home as well as abroad

"The kings must come down and the Emperors frown,
When the Widow of Windsor says stop.'

We have not yet carried the democratisation of our institutions to the ultimate, but it is with a smug sense of satisfaction that the great middle class, which never attends Drawing Rooms and knows nothing of Levees, remembers that in Disraeli's Cabinet,

which he garnished with dukes, no Minister had so much of Hr Majesty's confidence as the Lancashire lawyer who was then plain Mr. Richard Cross, and that in the last Liberal Administration no Minister at the Council Board was so liked by the Queen as the son of the Wesleyan minister who is now the Right Hon. Sir H. H. Fowler.

Nor is that all. The fortunate accident, if I may use such a word, that for sixty years the Throne has been occupied by a female sovereign, has been of inestimable advantage to the cause with which the future progress of the race is most closely bound up. The arrival of women on the stage of citizenship may possibly be regarded by the future historian as the greatest social and political event of the Victorian era. And in promoting and facilitating the advent of woman as a political factor, the Queen's influence has been simply incalculable. With a woman at the foretop of the State, no one could pretend that it was unwomanly to take a serious interest in State affairs. And with the steadily accumulated volume of testimony as to the supreme ability, the keen sagacity, and the shrewd commonsense with which the Queen bore herself in the greatest and most arduous position in the realm, no one of her subjects could honestly repeat the old rubbish about the natural incapacity of women. What the Queen's own views are upon the subject of Woman's Suffrage is comparatively immaterial. By the patient and punctilious discharge of all the complex and multifarious duties of her political and social position, the Queen has vindicated the capacity of her sex to perform political and social duties, and has dispelled as the sun dissipates the mist the foggy notions entertained by many as to political incapacity being one of the natural disabilities of her sex. Step by step the work of enfranchisement has proceeded, until there now remains but one last measure of reform to make the law as colour-blind to sex as it has long been colour-blind to sect. No more striking or appropriate method of commemorating the record reign in British history can be conceived than the abolition of the last rag of sex disability which still disfigures our Statute Book.

If the Queen's personal feeling on the subject of Woman's Suffrage is not known to her subjects, it is far otherwise in relation to a subject in which women, who are in a special sense guardians of the sanctity of the family in which they reign as queens, naturally take the keenest interest. I remember how deeply impressed I was eleven years ago, in the midst of the agitation for raising the age of consent, which incidentally landed me in gaol, by the universal conviction of all the women who were working in that cause that they had the heart-felt sympathy of the Queen. What evidence there was to that effect I do not know. But that they believed it, evidence or no evidence, heart and soul-to that I can testify beyond a doubt. Equally certain is it that this conviction of theirs that the Queen was on their side was to many a worn and heartsick toiler as a pillar of fire in a dark and dreary land.

Even before Her Majesty was able from her knowledge of life and experience as wife and mother to understand and to take her stand, the mere fact that she was a woman is reported to have warded off for nearly thirty years the shameful legislation which Mrs. Butler ultimately overthrew. The story goes that there was a proposition far back in the thirties to legalise compulsory examination by the Police des Mœurs, but that it was abandoned at the instance of Lord Melbourne. The Queen's first Prime Minister is said to have declared that it was impossible to ask the young maiden who had just ascended the Throne to sign such a measure, which of course it would have been his lot to explain to Her Majesty. So the idea was abandoned, and for thirty years the visitation was warded off.

The story may or may not be authentic. It was certainly firmly believed, and its

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