Undoubted Queen
By .CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS What is needed today, and what is singularly lacking, is a courteous and objective inquiry, free from personal anecdote, on the lines of Bagehot, into what the monarchy is for. In order that the great evil of anarchy be avoided, men must be per- suaded to accept authority. All authority is in the last analysis based on force, but, where the authority is generally accepted, it does not often have to humiliate its subjects by displaying its force nakedly. Men most easily accept forms of authority to which they are accustomed. If the traditional institutions of this country were re- moved, life would become an intolerable business of drab coercion. Therefore a country which possesses a traditional monarchy would be ill advised to abolish it.
Yet what is far less certain is how far the monarchy is a unifying, and how far it is a divid- ing, force in the Commonwealth. We used, of course, to be told that the monarchy was the great bond which united all the various countries of the Empire, and, when concessions came to be made to the Irish, we were ready in the last resort to abandon to them almost anything pro- vided that they kept an oath of allegiance to the King. Indeed, on the Irish side the great con- troversy which divided them at the time of the treaty was, oddly enough, not the acceptance of partition but the acceptance of the oath of allegiance.
Yet •Ireland was always thought of as a case apart. Now the growth of Oriental nationalism has created a new and unforeseen situation. In Australia and New Zealand the existence of a common sovereign has clearly strengthened the bonds of unity with this country. They feel that }jrp Majesty is their sovereign as much as she is ours. It is the same in Canada. Even the French Canadians, jealous to preserve their particular privileges, have no objection to an English- speaking sovereign. In South Africa it is more difficult : there, with conquest more recent, the monarchy appears to many Boers as a symbol * UNDOUBTED QUEEN. By H. Tatlock Miller and Loudon Sainthill. (Hutchinson, 63s.) of the British claim to be the superior race, whereas to them the Commonwealth, if tolerable at all, is only tolerable on the condition that the British are not the superior race.
But it is in the Indian sub-continent that the difficulty has been most apparent. We used to be told that the Indian, indifferent to complex argu- ments about a balance of powers, was yet moved by the simple appeal of loyalty to a person. Disraeli was praised for his imaginative stroke in making the Queen the Empress of India. What- ever constitutional reforms might be ,introduced into India, we were told, it was essential, if those reforms were to capture the native imagination, that the mystique of royalty be preserved and all be done in the name of the King or the Queen. I dare say that that was all true in the different world of the last century and that Disraeli was wise in his generation. It ryas dis- covered—somewhat to the surprise of most of us—that it was not true today, and, so far from the monarchy being the bond which kept the Commonwealth united, on the contrary the Orientals were quite willing to have the Common- wealth so long as they did not have to have the monarchy. A white sovereign seemed to them a symbol of racial discrimination, and India led the way in asking—a demand up till then unheard-of —to be a Republic within the Commonwealth.
There is no denying that this Oriental repudia- tion of the monarchy, and the consequent dis- covery that its general acceptance is not necessary for membership of the Commonwealth, has damaged the monarchy's importance, and some people have been found to wonder'—at any rate in private--what place hereditary monarchs have in an age of democracy. Nor can we deny that a large proportion of the countries of the world seem to get along tolerably well without them. Who will venture to prophesy what the future will bring? Yet surely it is a curious naïveté which takes it for granted that our parliamentary in- stitutions in their present form are likely to endure for ever. The experience of history shows that democracy is in some ways the most logical and in some ways the best, but is also the most short- lived of all forms of government. No one can feel much confidence that it may not prove as short- lived in this country as it has in others. In many ways it has shown itself grossly ill-adapted to the changing circumstances of modern life.
If it should fall it would indeed be both highly improbable and highly undesirable that there should be substituted for it a system which re- stored real power of government to a hereditary monarchy. The far more probable danger would clearly be that there would be substituted for it on the modern pattern a system which gave power to a non-hereditary monarchy—to a dic- tator. The chances of preventing this, the chances of establishing some regime which paid respect' to our traditional liberties, would be enormously greater if we had had the wisdom to preserve our traditional institutions, of which the monarchy is the chief. The danger of a collapse of parlia- mentary government is admittedly not immediate, but it is nevertheless a danger that must be pre- pared against, and institutions which derive their strength from tradition must look forward to a distant future, even as they look back to a distant past. They cannot be tailored to meet a particular crisis. On the contrary, they derive their strength in a particular crisis from the very fact that they have not been so tailored—from the very fact that they have existed immemorially and been taken for granted long before the particular crisis was ever heard of. For that reason they should be preserved.
Previous page
