Sir George Grey himself, speaking at Sydney in New South Wales in 1891, gave on his own personal authority further and more important detail as to the sentiment o the Queen : "When I was a representative of the Queen in Africa, I had arranged a federation of the different States there, all having agreed to come into it except one; but the plan was regarded with disfavour both by the Ministry and the Opposition of the day in Engalnd, and the consequence was that I was summarily dismissed. One person in the Empire held that I was right in the action taken, and that person was the Queen. Upon her representation I was reinstated. Her Majesty, together with the Prince Consort, held that it was necessary to preserve to the Empire an opening for the poor and the adventurous, and experience had shown that the Queen better represented the feelings of the British people on that question than did the Ministers of the day. The Queen held, rightly, that the energies of the British race should spread the Empire as instinct moved them, so long as no wrong was done to other people." George Grey. I need But this is a study of the Queen, not a Character Sketch of Sir not pursue further the story of his unique and romantic career. South Africa rose enthusiastically to welcome him back, and expressed the sentiments of all in tendering his "warmest thanks to Her Majesty Queen Victoria for being an eye to the blind in sending" back Sir George Grey to the Cape. "An eye to the blind" she had been indeed, but not even that Royal Eye could make Downing Street perceive the advantages of Federation. As if still further to emphasise the Royal favour, Prince Alfred was sent to make a tour through South Africa. He was hailed everywhere with enthusiasm. The chants of welcome raised by the Kaffirs declared, "We have seen the child of heaven! We have seen the son of our Queen!" The Chief Sandilli and his councillors were invited to visit the Euryalus, where at sunrise they found Prince Alfred swabbing down the deck barefooted. They watched with amazement, and then retiring they dictated an address to the captain. The closing passages may well be quoted here: 66 Up to this time we had not ceased to be amazed at the wonderful things we have witnessed, and which are beyond our comprehension. But one thing we understand, the reason of England's greatness, when the son of her great Queen becomes subject to a subject that he may learn wisdom; when the sons of England's chiefs and nobles leave the homes and wealth of their fathers, and with their young Prince endure hardships and sufferings in order that they may be wise, and become a defence to their country. When we behold these things, we see why the English are a great and mighty nation. "What we have now learnt shall be transmitted to our wondering countrymen, and handed down to our children, who will be wiser than their fathers, and your mighty Queen shall be their sovereign and ours in all time coming.' VII.--WHY THE EMPIRE SURVIVES. No generalisations, however eloquent, could convey so vividly as the story of Sir George Grey's relations to the Queen and the Colonial Office the value of the Monarch to the Empire over which she reigns. No one can pretend that the Queen strayed a hair's breadth from her constitutional duty in the support which she extended to the brave and patriotic statesmen who saved South Africa and who did not a little to save India. The Queen gave him a pocket chronometer with an inscription after Prince Alfred left the Colony, and sent him a letter in which his Sovereign thanked her subject in words that are more precious than the Order of the Garter. The Queen, after thanking Sir George for his kindness to her child, went on to say : "She trusts that the effect produced on the nation and people in general will be as lasting and beneficial as it must have been on Prince Alfred to have witnessed the manner in which Sir George Grey devotes his whole time and energy to promote the happiness and welfare of his fellow-creatures.' For a tenth part of such a tribute the bravest knights of Elizabeth would have flung their lives away. The praises of Victoria are not less sweet, nor is their recipient less to be envied than those who sunned themselves in the favour of Good Queen Bess. But there was nothing here that conflicted with the loyal abiding by the counsels of her Ministers. Blind leaders of the blind those Ministers were, and that she knew THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIDRARICƏ right well before they floundered into the ditch of Majuba Hill. But suppressing herself, she acquiesced, as in constitutional duty bound, in their foolish way. Only where it was well within her right, when opportunity offered, she cheered with gracious and sympathetic words those who were fighting the good fight for England and the Empire. When we contemplate the spectacle offered of that steady and silent ministry of grace, of succour, and of strong consolation to the Knights of St. George, we cease to PRINCE ALBERT. (From an engraving by F. C. Lewis after F. Winterhalter.)' marvel at the inspiration that sustained them amidst merciless official discouragement. They fought, they strove, they conquered because they knew that their Sovereign Lady the Queen knew and appreciated the loyalty with which they served the country. Ministers too often represented nothing but a faction. The Queen was the personifi cation of the genius of England. In "Pilgrim's Progress" few episodes are more familiar than that which describes the secret of the fire that could not be extinguished : “Then I saw in my dream, that the Interpreter took Christian by the hand, and led him into a place where was a fire burning against a wall, and one standing by it, always casting much water upon it, to quench it; yet did the fire burn higher and hotter. "So he had him about to the back-side of the wall, where he saw a man with a vessel of oil in his hand, of which he did also continually cast (but secretly) into the fire." It is not difficult to find a modern nineteenth century application of Bunyan's story. The fire that burns, and that will not be extinguished, is the bright flame of Imperial patriotism. Downing Street in vain endeavours to extinguish it by pouring a steady stream of cold water: the flame will not die; for behind the scenes a royal hand feeds it ceaselessly with the oil of encouragement. If, which Heaven forefend, the Throne were ever to be occupied by a Sovereign who shared the heresies of the Little Englanders, we should soon see a great and notable falling off in the zeal of our adventurous sons. What the results have been of having a monarch keenly sensitive to every manifestation of the Imperial spirit may be seen in the phenomenal growth of the Empire since she ascended the throne, and the unexampled content of the native populations. Not until long after the Queen passes to her ancestors shall we know how much we have owed to the extraordinary personal prestige which she enjoyed among the distant tribes among whom her legions maintain a Roman peace, or how great has been the stimulus and reward of her approval to the men who made her Empire. Her Majesty has been no buccaneering Jingo, inciting her soldiers and sailors, her pro-consuls and her adventurers to schemes of conquest. With the exception of the two disastrous periods, when the sober and sagacious mind of the Monarch suffered a temporary eclipse from the passing passion of Russophobia, Her Majesty has exercised a singularly level-headed judgment upon Imperial affairs. Even in the mad frenzy of the Crimean War, Windsor Castle was far more keenly alert than Downing Street to the dangers and disadvantages inseparable from a war that tended to prolong the rule of the Turks in Europe. Lord Palmerston was a pro-Turk. The Queen never allowed her dread of Russia to blind her to the objectionable nature of her unspeakable ally. Still, the prejudice and passion engendered by the skilfully fostered agitation against Russia poisoned her mind in 1854, and the effects of that malaria predisposed her to fall a ready victim to the Earl of Beaconsfield. Even after he had been cast out of place and power as an accused thing by the nation whom he had misled, Her Majesty still clung to the relics of his repudiated policy. If she could have prevented it, our evacuation of Kandahar would never have taken place. That, however, was but a pardonable failing. There are spots on the sun, and even Queen Victoria is not without the defects of her qualities. But when Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Devonshire insisted, she acquiesed loyally, although regretfully, in their decision. What she lacked in power she made up in influence. She could not descend to the hustings, or canvass the electors. But when the brawling electioneerers had done their work, when the ballet boxes had yielded up their secret, when the elect of the people came with the mandate of the democracy to the councils of the Queen, he found awaiting him the most experienced political brain in the Empire, a lady who had probably forgotten more statecraft than he had ever learnt, to whom every Colony was more familiar than the jewels in her crown, and who approached every great question that came up for settlement from the vantage point of a great position, backed up by unexampled experience. "Power," said Lord Beaconfield, "belongs to the best informed.” And from the beginning of her reign the Queen has been better informed about her dominions over-sea than any of her Prime Ministers. Lord Clarendon nearly forty years ago bore witness to the zeal and assiduity with which the Queen mastered the subjects with which she had to deal. He told Mr. Granville, in 1857 "The Queen held each Minister to the discharge of his duty and his responsibility to her, and con stantly desired to be furnished with accurate and detailed information about all important matters, keeping a record of all the reports that were made to her, and constantly recurring to them, e.g., she would desire to know what the state of the Navy was, and what ships were in readiness for active service, and generally the state of each, ordering returns to be submitted to her from all the arsenals and dockyards, and, again, weeks or months afterwards, referring to these returns and desiring to have everything relating to them explained and accounted for; and so throughout every department.” Nor did the Queen ever restrict herself to Ministerial channels of information. Her correspondence with her Colonial Governors, Indian Viceroys, and other representatives has been continuous and voluminous. And all of these notables of the Empire were proud to give the Sovereign Lady of the Realm the ripest fruit of their observation and experience. Lord Palmerston in 1863, as he was nearing the close of a long Ministerial career, declared that the Queen had ever scrupulously acted upon the counsels of her Ministers; but he went on to say: "A strict observance of these fundamental principles does not, however, preclude the Sovereign from seeking from all quarters from whence it can be obtained the fullest and most accurate information regarding matters upon which the responsible Ministers may from time to time tender advice, and upon which it is not only right but useful that the Sovereign should form an opinion, to be discussed with the Ministers, if it should differ from the tendered advice." Mr. Gladstone, the only other Minister whose career can be compared to Lord Palmerston's for duration and variety of service, has borne testimony as unqualified to her "thorough comprehension of the conditions of the great Covenant between the Throne and the People." It is obvious that such a Sovereign so minutely and accurately informed concerning all the details of all the Colonies and Dependencies of her world-wide Empire could not fail to exercise a potent influence in Council, and has, as a matter of fact, repeatedly succeeded in deflecting tendencies which, but for her watchful care, might have brought the Empire much ill. The story of the part taken by the Queen in the Indian Mutiny can only be glanced at here. Whether it was in urging that vigorous measures should be taken to cope with the crisis at the beginning, or in lifting up a warning voice at its close against the savagery of vengeance, the Queen took a leading hand in all that went on. Her letters to Lord Panmure urging the despatch of reinforcements are the letters of one accustomed to command, and to whom the responsibility of Empire was a very real thing. She wrote, for instance, on one occasion "The Queen is anxious to impress in the most earnest manner upon her Government the necessity of our taking a comprehensive view of our military position at the present momentous crisis, instead of going on without a plan, living from hand to mouth, and taking small isolated measures without reference to each other." As the result of their inconsiderate reductions in the spring there were no troops available but those who had been at the Crimea, and thus said the Queen, with the natural indignation proper to a sympathetic woman-"Having passed through this destructive campaign, they have not been home for a year before they are to go to India for perhaps twenty years. This is most cruel and unfair to the gallant men who devote their services to the country." Her Majesty is always looking after the Empire and at the same time the Widow of Windsor never forgets Tommy Atkins. Hence if we were to ask how it is that the Empire has grown and thriven so marvellously all these years, until all sane citizens are proud of its extent and solicitous for its unity, we may find a clue to the secret in the fact that in the actual workings of our Constitution, the Sovereign, who must be heard by the natural operation of the combined forces of knowledge, experience, continuity, and resolution, has, as a matter of fact, in the broad outlines of our Imperial and Colonial policy, become, if not "She who must be Obeyed," then certainly "She who has been Obeyed," and will be obeyed yet more and more so long as it please God to spare her to live and reign over her loyal and contented people. Let no one imagine that the Queen ever contented herself with holding the sound Imperial doctrine as a pious opinion. It has been with her a faith which she propagated with the zeal of an apostle, and with a tact and a scruple to which many apostles are strangers. One of the means, by no means inefficacious, which Her Majesty employed was that of dispatching, as commis-voyageurs of the Empire, the Princes of the Blood on tour through India and the Colonies. The Prince of Wales, while but a youth, visited Canada, and in his later life made the tour of India. The Duke of Edinburgh travelled through the South African Colonies and visited Australia. The sons of the Prince of Wales in the Bacchante made the tour of the world. The Marchioness of Lorne repre sented her family at Ottawa when her husband was Governor-General of the Dominion. The Duke of Connaught has served in India. These were not mere accidental trips or holiday tours. The Princes were used deliberately as shuttles in the Imperial loom. Shortly before his death the Prince Consort exclaimed :— "How important and beneficent is the part given to the Royal Family of England to act in the development of those distant and rising countries which recognise in the British Crown, and their allegiance to it, their supreme bond of union with the mother country and with each other." That beneficent function the Royal Family has sedulously discharged. Nor have they ever failed to speak and act as peripatetic apostles of Imperial unity. That note is always present in the Royal utterances. When the Australian Colonies celebrated their centenary, the Queen saluted them with a message which accurately expresses her relations to the great self-governing Colonies: "The Queen warmly congratulates the Australian colonies on the splendid material and social progress achieved during the past hundred years. She deeply appreciates their loyalty, and has watched with sincere interest the excellent administration of their Governments, and she prays that their prosperity and close attachment to the mother country may continue to increase as hitherto." When her Jubilee was to be celebrated, the one gift which she desired from her subjects was something that would be a help to promote unity. Speaking of the proposed Memorial of her Jubilee, the Prince of Wales said :— "In order to afford the Queen the fullest satisfaction, the proposed memorial should not merely be personal in its character, but should tend to serve the interests of the entire Empire, and to promote a feeling of unity among the whole of Her Majesty's subjects." What wonder is it, then, that a Canadian subject of Her Majesty, Mr. Castell Hopkins, who has just published a portly volume descriptive of the Sovereign and her reign, should bear the following emphatic testimony to the services which the Queen has rendered the Empire:-- "Of the forces working for union during the past sixty years, the most potent has been the personality and position of the Sovereign. Of those working for disintegration the chief has been the Manchester school of economists and theorists. The Queen has been a rallying-point of loyalty throughout all the dark days of early struggle and political disaffection in Canada, and through the later events of American commercial coercion or efforts at annexationist conciliation; throughout all the gloomy days of South African wars and maladministration and Imperial indifference; throughout the times of Australian conflict with the transportation system and struggles with a stormy and rough mining democracy; throughout the days of West Indian decadence or New Zealand's contests with powerful Maoris, and its more recent struggles with the crude vagaries of Socialism run mad. Everywhere the name and qualities and constitutional action of the Queen have permeated Colonial politics, preserved Colonial loyalty, helped the British sentiment of the people, and developed their Constitutions along British lines. THE UNIVERSITY UP MILNIŲAN LIDRANILO |