TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.
TT is not for political reasons that the nation mourns the I Prince Consort, though there are political reasons enough to justify its grief. As the melancholy tidings spread through England, generally announced, as it happened, in the ancient fashion, from the pulpit, the heart of the people burned instinctively with sympathy for their Queen. Four- and-twenty years of a wise and gentle reign, marked at once by mighty events, and by the prosperity usually confined to uneventful cycles, have re-established that personal relation between Englishmen and their Sovereign which ceased with the death of the last of the Stuart line. The Georges were monarchs, not kings, supported or hated as representatives of a system, and William the Fourth, despite the Reform Bill, was but fitfully loved. A female reign so long that the new generation remember no other, so prosperous that it will, we fear, constitute an exceptional era, so moderate that the people have never felt the beginning of an impulse to resist the Court, and have but once murmured their disapproval of its proceedings, has re-established the sentiment as well as the habit of loyalty, and there is not a household in the kingdom where the Queen's gladness or grief is not a matter of personal concern. The ancient and priceless feeling, which is as efficacious to bind a nation together as love is stronger than self-interest, has revived in all its force ; so revived, that among a population which for a hundred years has lavished sarcastic invective on its monarchs, the lowest compiler of broadsheets dares not offer a verbal discourtesy to the Queen. The first instinctive murmur of hundreds of congregations on Sunday last was, " What of the Queen 9" and the over con- cise bulletin which showed that her Majesty had not suc- cumbed to this new shock was received with a feeling of individual relief. That life, then, was saddened, not menaced, and men might breathe, without expectation of a calamity still greater than that which had occurred. The loss of the Prince Consort, though grief for him could not be the first thought of the multitude, is in itself no small calamity. We do not mean only in re- gard to his influence with the Sovereign, of which so much has been said. That it was as irresistible as that of a husband with his wife usually is, we know from a hundred signs ; that it was for good, is evident from the loyalty which is to-day expressed and felt towards the throne. But beyond those broad facts, action of this kind is almost outside the pale of discussion, and quite beyond that of analysis. The Prince had a more direct influence, and one of no mean order. For twenty years he has been, as Earl Russell avowed during the Crimean war, an informal but most potent member of every Cabinet. So clear was this position, that the mass, with the unreasonable and most useful jealousy of the foreigner habitual to Englishmen, murmured at him whenever a disaster seemed to check the prosperity they are accustomed, through the persistent kindness of Heaven, to look upon almost as a right. It was an inestimable advan- tage to England that he should be there, that some man with English interests, but not with English ideas, should have a voice to be heard in the centre of our poli- tical system. There is a tendency in all English poli- tics to selfishness, to consider nothing but the apparent and immediate interests of England, which requires just such a corrective as an adviser, a political Remembrances, in the position of the Prince. Linked to half the great Houses of the Continent, aware of all those personal aims and traditional sympathies which still mould to an inconceivable degree the movements of the great European families, himself the political head of a widely ramified and most aspiring House, Prince Albert had means of maturing wise counsel such as no English statesman could ever hope to possess. If that position gave him a wish to exalt the dynasty to which he belonged, so much the better for Eng- land, for it is the only one which in all its branches, Catholic as well as Protestant, has honestly accepted the truth that monarchy is compatible with freedom. If this minute know- ledge gave him sympathy with Germany and interest in her tedious development, that also was to English advantage, for alliance with Germany is, we may rely on it, the peace policy of the future. These resources were directed by a clear and somewhat cold intellect, which, while attentive to all details, did not forget those references to principle which English- men call "transcendental politics," but which bear to progress the relation which pure mathematics bear to science. They are not to interfere with the immediate action, but their neglect would be fatal to all broad advance, and ultimately destroy the possibility of lofty and far-sighted statesmanship. The Prince who told us that constitutionalism—not merely the English constitution, but the principle on which it rests— was on its trial in the Crimean war, did us a service all the greater because at the moment the remark, like all tonics, tasted bitter in the mouth. It was the same with the Art and Science to which the Prince usually confined his public interference. He sought in those departments, as in politics, to do the work no other individual could have done, to keep in view abstract thought, the principles of education, or the world- wide instead of the purely insular standard. That was the motive of the Exhibition of 1851, and the Prince was not responsible for that outburst of vanity, that newest form of idolatry, the worship of the reflexiou of one's own face under the name of the nineteenth century which made the Exhibition an evil it took two great wars to correct. To all such tasks the Prince brought a refined taste, wide know- ledge, and a total absence of preference for immediate and palpable advantage, for, as it were, the study of machinery over the study of motive powers. His mind supplemented the English mind as his policy supplemented English politics, and his loss to the Queen is one of those mistbrtunes which time obliterates but does not repair, and under which the only consolation worth hearing is that which is older than England, "The Lord is King be the people never so impa- tient; He sitteth between the Cherubim be the earth never so unquiet."
Previous page
