TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUEEN.
MUCH praise has been written of the Queen, some of it a little too Oriental for our taste, and much of it based upon a confusion between her action and that of her people—the Queen, for instance, is really not re- sponsible for the introduction of railways—but most of those who have written have passed over a quality which is her Majesty's own, but which has been of infinite service to the commonwealth. With the possible excep- tion of Isabella of Castile—Louisa of Prussia, remember, only reigned indirectly—no woman on a throne has ever exhibited in such perfection what Royal tact should be, a mingling of kindness and dignity, with a keen perception of the situation around her. It has been Queen Victoria's habit throughout her long reign to break occasionally the silence which is imposed on constitutional Sovereigns, and which must be sometimes one of the heaviest of their burdens—imagine being a King when all is going wrong, and you see what would be right, and yet must remain motionless as any other figurehead—with utterances that are clearly her own, yet no one can recall one of them which offended her people, or produced any impression except one of gratitude to Providence that at last the right person occupied the throne. To how many Sovereigns has that gift been given, or in which of them does it reside now, even though one amongst them at least is an orator of no mean force ? And still, when the Qiieen approaches so closely to the verge of usual human life that few among us remember clearly any other Sovereign, amidst much bodily, weakness, and a strong sense of age, the faculty remains intact. Always the few. brief sentences deepen the double impression of a womanliness which yet is consistent with the recol. lection that she is Queen, and that her notice honours those on whom it falls. There can be little doubt that the Queen feels keenly the pressure of the necessity which has destroyed the hope that the closing years of her wonderful reign might be years of un- broken tranquillity and progress. She at least wanted no war, if only because she must be satiated with triumph, content with her Empire, incapable of even wishing for the defeat of more enemies, or the acquisition of fresh dominion. Yet the sad necessity once perceived, her Majesty utters nothing that is not either an encourage- ment to her soldiers or a solace to those left behind by the victims of the war. There is no word of regret for herself, nothing but sympathy for her people, couched in words which in some strangely effective way, effective because it is instinctive, recall the fact that it is a great Q leen who is speaking. Take the words of farewell to the Household Cavalry uttered at Windsor on Saturday last : —"I have asked you, who have always served near me, to come here, that I may take leave of you before you start on your long voyage to a distant part of my Empire, in whose defence your comrades are now so nobly fighting. I know that you will always do your duty to your Sovereign and your country, wnerever that duty may lead you, and I pray God to protect you and bring you back safely home." "You "—the idea might be put in other and less well-chosen words—" are my personal guards, and honoured in so being, and to you I now express my friendship and my hopes for your safety as well as your success." It seems a slight thing to say, a conventionalism many will describe it, but think what under those cir- cumstances most other Monarchs would have said, in what lengthy sentences they would have expressed their own sense of being the pivot of all military preparation, and their affection for men about to fight for their honour and their cause. The Queen arrives at their result, or a better result, without affording even an opportunity for criticism. Her few natural words carry more meaning to the hearts of those who hear them than the most eloquent outburst of oratory could do. She has in truth, not from any culture or ex- perience, but from the grace of God, a talent for silence which is not cold, for reticence in which there is no guile, and there is no form of capacity in a constitutional Sovereign more profitable to the people. Just reflect for a moment on the scenes that would have occurred had the Queen, remaining as good as she is, as qualified as she is, as constitutional as she is, been an indiscreet talker, given, let us say, to the epigrams in which so many women have avenged their powerlessness, or crushed the reputation of their otherwise unreachable foes. Party govern- ment would have been almost impossible, even if we had not seen at last that long-forgotten danger of the Consti- tution as it is, a Sovereign's party holding the balance of power. Walter Bagehot said the Constitution would be near a breakdown whenever a man of genius mounted the throne ; we can imagine a Sovereign without genius behind whom whole classes would rank themselves in- stead of the whole nation. To-day the people are one, standing silent but determined round their standard, and one, at least, of the reasons is that for sixty years their Queen, who not only bears but is that standard, has had no impulse to speak a word which her people felt had better have been left unspoken. The standard has not only never been lowered, it has never in the hottest tumult of battle swayed to one side or the other. Always when the battle was over the standard was there, a centre for the pation to rally round as if it had never been divided.
There will of course come a time, probably after the next King's death, when the secret history of the Victorian period will be more accurately known—when memoirs have appeared in shoals and reminiscences in clouds, when private letters in scores have leaped to light, and the secretly hostile as well as the courtly have all said their say—and then no doubt the personality of the Queen will be more fully understood, and every one will settle whether, she most resembled Queen Elizabeth, or Queen Anne, or herself as her subjects during their reign had pictured her. But even then the world, which will know all that happened, will never know what might have happened had not her Majesty been so strangely suited to the post which Providence called on her to fill. The Monarchy was rocking when William TV. expired. Years later the coolest observers imagined that a great Republican party would be formed, and speculated whether the great change could be achieved in a constitutional way. The Monarchy, transmuted by the steady attitude of the Queen, is probably stronger than it has ever been, certainly better rooted in the temperate yet devoted liking of its subjects. The feeling for Republicanism, unexasperated by Royal blunders, has quietly died away into a philosophic doubt entertained by a few thinking men whether on the whole a people can be quite fitted for self-government without visibly and openly governing itself. The idea, of a rival dynasty is as dead as if it had never been the pre- dominant thought of English politicians, dead so long that our mention of it will seem to most of our readers an absurd anachronism. Two great Colonies—Canada and Australia—have grown into subordinate States capable of sending out armies ; and mainly because there is a standard which is reverenced, a Queen who affronts no one, and neglects no one, and preaches to no one obedience as a gospel, they are actually fighting that the Empire which protects and controls them may endure. Even South Africa teaches the same lesson ; for though civil war is raging there, every Englishman on that continent stands steadily by the flag, and professes as his political faith that he is 'for the Queen." Would he.have been for the British Republic ? And one reason, at least, why we have not tried that dangerous experiment is that the Queen has never, either by action or opinion, aroused the . faintest degree of hostility,—a fact the more noteworthy because one-half, at least, of the common folk are still persuaded that laws are made by the Queen, and that her Majesty raises and spends at her own discretion all that is known as "the Queen's Taxes." it is usual to say that this success is mainly due to the sex of the Queen, or to her virtues, but while we are not sure whether but for the career of the Queen herself feminine sovereignty would be considered so desirable, we are sure that blundering is at least as fatal to dynasties as evil conduct. Charles L and Louis XVI. were not beheaded for their vices. All honour to the virtues of the Queen, but beside them there must have been a power of avoiding, blunders, of saying and doing the right thing at the right moment, a body of clear sense, in short, which has never been sufficiently recognised by the people, and to which the people owe much of that permission to grow in liberty - and order of which they have so largely availed them- selves. The expansion of England is their work, but it is work which could hardly have been done but for the per- sonality which for more than sixty years has provided them with a pivot round which, if necessity arose, they were prepared to die.
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