NEWS OF THE WEEK I T is too soon yet to
say that the prayers of the nation for the King have been answered. The warning that anxiety must remain for some days holds good still. Not for a week or ten days more will it be possible for the doctors to declare that the danger is past, though if before then the Princess and the Duke have left for Canada the nation will, with deep thankfulness, draw its own conclusions about the probabilities. It is at- times like these that the mystique of king- ship, which few foreigners can understand and which often perplexes • Englishmen themselves, is at its strongest. There is a certain divinity doth hedge a king, but it does not mean, for the great part of the nation, any acceptance of the divine right of kings ;.a sovereign who betrayed the high traditions of his high office might end sovereignty in this country. The King is a man like other men ; the surgeon's knife can spare him no more than them ; but in his person he represents something—all the long history of the British people—as no other man in the kingdom does or could. He is part of his people, in a sense almost part of every family in it. Nothing else could explain the depth of anxiety and grief the news of the peril to the King's life caused. A weight has rested on every spirit. One concern has taken possession of every mind. It may have been a certain morbid curiosity that took some part of the crowds to Buckingham Palace day after day this week, but essentially it was a vague but very real desire to give anxiety and sympathy expression. Everyone cares. Everyone wants to find a way to show how much. And when the Queen tells the party leaders how the expressions of sympathy have helped her and the Princesses she Is certainly using no mere conventional words.
