TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE VIOLENCE TO THE QUEEN.
The event should teach the nation not indeed that the Queen dreads such public ceremonials as she has recently gone through,—for we believe her equanimity and gallantry to be quite beyond any fear of this kind,—but that there is a cer- tain amount of real risk to the Head of the nation attending all such excitements of the public mind; and that the Queen, in totally disregarding such risk and thinking simply of her official duties, has an additional claim upon our gratitude. We should think little of such courage in a man, in whom it would be only what was fitting ; but in a woman who has now been five times publicly assailed, and who has never shrunk, either at the moment or afterwards, from any discharge of public duty, there is a real mettle which we ought heartily to recognize. No one knows better than the Queen that Royal processions and Royal thanksgivings and great ceremonials of all kinds, which fix public attention on the highest person in the realm, are sure to breed some sort of mad design or caprice in some of her numerous family of thirty millions. Doubtless she also knows haw difficult it is for weak brains to carry out the foolish purposes thus bred in thenr.- Bat no monarch has ever ignored more completely the nervous apprehensions which might well have been inspired by the occurrences of this nature during her reign ; and the Queen ought certainly to know that the life which she so fearlessly ex- poses to the perhaps not very grave but real risks which cleave to. every throne, and especially to every throne which is set up over an empire constituted of races. whereof some are more or less disaffected to the sceptre, is,rendered dearer to her people by every alarm and every escape which she undergoes.
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