TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUEEN'S SERVICES TO THE NATION. rERE has been much said, and eloquently said, about the Queen's services to the nation, but we doubt whether the people have tried to realise at all carefully what those services have been. Have they even dis- tinguished between what she has done and what she has not done, and have they been more grateful to her for what she has not done than they have been for what she has done ? Do they look upon her as worthy of even more respect for what she has abstained from doing, than they do for what she has succeeded in doing ? Or do they regard her control over her statesmen, and her wisdom in Council, as probably even a still greater feature in her long and prosperous reign than her sixty years of wise self-restraint and carefully veiled personality ?
These are the questions which seem hardly to have been asked, and certainly as much as possible left unanswered till history pronounces judgment on her reign. And no doubt there is wisdom in our reserve as well as in hers.
One great advantage in having a woman on the throne is that we are unwilling to pry too much into the secret history of her reign, and that we suppress that combative- ness which we are only too ready to exert when the people thinks or imagines itself matched against a self-willed man. Englishmen are strongly disposed to be jealous of an able or even a feeble Monarch, so long as he endeavours to control those whose advice they think that he should implicitly accept. But with a woman they are not so peremptory. With her they are more willing to acquiesce in the etiquette of a constitu- tional Monarchy, and ask as few questions as they can about the secrets of Cabinet government. We are much too apt to forget that the self-restraint of the people is quite as important as the self-restraint of the Monarch, in the game of constitutional monarchy. And it is be- cause we remember this much better when a Queen is on the throne than we do when a man rules us, that the throne is always safer in the possession of a woman. Therefore we are far from regretting that even when we are all gratitude for a. long and brilliant reign, we are not too anxious to distinguish carefully between what we owe to the ruler, and what we owe to her statesmen. It is not a question easy to answer even after all has been done and the account closed ; and it is impossible to answer it pre- maturely when the most important part of the procurable evidence is not yet in our hands. Still there are some parts of that evidence which it is neither unwise nor difficult to dwell upon at such a crisis as this, and we believe that so far as they go, they all or almost all tend to increase our gratitude to the reigning Sovereign, instead of to diminish it.
We may say quite confidently that, so far as we have at present the means of judging, whenever the Queen has held aloof from interfering with the counsel of her politi- cal advisers, she has done well, and that she has entitled herself to honour and not to any atom of censure. Mis- takes have probably been often made in our policy ; no doubt the Crimean War may have been a serious mistake, but whoever was in fault, it certainly was not the Mon- arch. No blunder could have been greater than for a constitutional Monarch to have refused her assent to the advice of her Ministers when the whole people were as enthusiastic for the policy which was pressed upon her as any of those Ministers themselves. Nor do we know of any event in her reign of which there could be said to be the slightest evidence produced, that she acquiesced in their advice when she should have taken her own line, and used that great influence which even the most constitutional of constitutional Monarchs possesses for giving the casting-vote against the advice of her Ministers. There is more than one instance in which it is surmised, on very fair grounds, that the Queen has used her power to delay an important decision. But they are instances in which, even if the surmise was true, she either withdrew her objection so soon as she found that to persist would have separated her from the majority of her people, or in which she persisted because it became perfectly clear that she had the people with her. We do not pretend to know more than other people about the secrets of the Cabinet, but most people suppose that the Irish Church Disestablishment Bill was an example of the former kind, and the Irish Home-rule Bill an example of the latter kind. Whether this be so or not, it is perfectly, clear that, if the surmise was right, the policy actually adopted by her was right on both occasions, first ia hesitating, and finally giving up her hesitation, on the Irish Church question, and next in hesitating, and continuing, to hesitate till she found that her people were with her, on the Irish Home-rule question. No case can be pro- duced in which she left the decision to her statesmen when she might have held them back, in which it would have been both possible and prudent for a sagacious Monarch to have put a veto on the advice given to her. Indeed whenever there is a doubt it is always wiser for a constitutional Monarch to leave the responsibility of action to her Minister who has the people behind him, and this we can hardly be wrong in supposing to have been the Queen's great principle during her long reign. It is of course less easy to say whether the Queen has actually interfered when it would have been wiser not to interfere with the advice tendered to her. English Ministers always feel it their duty, and rightly feel it their duty, to shelter the throne, and never throw the responsibility of action on the Crown unless they think it a matter of the very first importance to the English State to ward off what they deem a dangerous resolve. Of such a crisis we have had no example in the present reign ; and having had none it is impossible for us to say whether or not she has ever thrown the sceptre into the seal& against the advice of her Minister. It seems to us very unlikely, looking to the whole course of her reign and the great amount of gossip which has been publicly put forward and canvassed without the least trace of any tangible accusation against the Crown. But whether it be so or not, it is certain that if ever she has so interfered,—of which no one has ever produced the least evidence,—it must have been in a case where the Minister himself was at least too little confident in the wisdom of his own counsel, to set his own judgment against the Queen's. And that being so, it is at least as likely as not that she (who certainly would have been on the side of prescription and caution) was in the right.
It is a much more difficult question to approach whether the Queen's judgment has ever actually so far affected that of her advisers as to alter their advice, or at least render them sufficiently doubtful of their own judgment, to prefer deferring to the judgment of the Queen. It seems to us very probable that this result may have taken place not unfrequently, especially in foreign policy, where the Queen has always been in possession of a consecutive chain of facts and opinions, and has had the best means of dis- criminating between the value of the several opinions sub- mitted to her. At any rate, nothing can be more certain than that when her judgment has either overruled, or at least suspended, the advice of her constitutional advisers, the responsibility has remained upon them, not upon her. They accepted counsel of the very first weight in deferring to her, and it was their own act that they deferred to her and did not persist in tendering their own earlier counsel. This is just one of those cases in which the Sovereign exercises a legitimate constitutional authority by producing to the advisers of the Crown new reasons, or a new confirmation of old reasons, for taking a different course from that which the Minister has proposed. The Sovereign has always been one member, and in the case of able Sovereigns, one of the most influential members, of the Cabinet. And nothing can be more reasonable than that this should be so. Of course the Sovereign is closely identified with the welfare of the people, and has the highest in- terest possible in their content and prosperity, and of course, too, the Sovereign has access to all the best sources of political judgment. It is certain that no ruler who is not sagacious will have anything like the same influence with the Minister as a Sovereign who is sagacious and who has a good dose of popular sympathy in him (or her). We all know how much more anxious Sovereigns often are to have the people on their side than even the shrewdest and most popular Minister. They frequently feel them- selves the best representative of the people, and know that they often see the popular view of the case a great deal better than the so-called popular Minister of either party. Mr. Disraeli believed in the influence of the Crown on the people and of the people on the Crown, as very few Ministers of either party have believed in it, and it was for that reason, we imagine, that the Queen attached so much importance to his advice. Even in despotic countries the Sovereign has often represented the people better than any of the Sovereign's advisers. And shrewd Ministers know this, and are always anxious to hear what a shrewd Sovereign thinks on any great popular issue. We are too apt to forget that the Sovereign is not only one of the Cabinet, but one of the most influential members of the Cabinet, where the double line of authoritative tradition and of popular tradition, are carefully cherished by her, and are regarded as closely identified with each other. We hold that the Sovereign is one of the most influential advisers of the nation, and not the less so that no one has the right to overrule her advice, and to say, 'this is the view of the Queen' and that is the view of her Minister.'
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