. . . LONG LIVE THE KING
GUEDALLA By PHILIP
to be King of IT is not easy for a young man England. Even if he is not quite so young as he appears to be, the fact is slow to penetrate ; and nothing will prevent men of half his experience from viewing him with the indulgent eyes of age. True, their travels may not have taken them further than a few Continental health-resorts, and their conversation rarely moves beyond the groove of their profession, whilst he is equally accustomed to ships at sea, railway-trains in Africa, and aeroplanes above the Andes and has listened in his time to almost every kind of specialist talking shop. But there is nothing to prevent his elders from feeling comfortably certain that they must know more about it all because they happen to be older.
Yet if experience is to count for anything, it is not easy to say just how many years of average experience have been crowded into that short lifetime. Men of twice his age are lucky if they have seen half as much. The years slide past them, and they will reach the honourable end of their professional careers without touching life at more than a quarter of the points where he has made contact with it. His life has been a swift training in the elements of commerce, several professions, war and diplomacy, with illustrations on the spot from men who know their business well enough to be at the head of it. An education of that order is a fair substitute for greying hair. For it ages a man rapidly, and he can hardly help being a trifle older than hiS years. So possibly the King of England is not quite so young as he may seem to all his subjects.
But it is not easy for a man of any age to be the King of England in 1936. Even if England were all that he has to 'be king of, it -Would be anything but easy. For modern England is a bewildering affair, a shifting complex of politics, economics, public ser- vices and private enterprise, consisting in unequal parts of agriculture, trade returns, sport, unemploy- ment, national defence, and the West End of London ; and a true king must make himself at home in all of them. The old simplicities have vanished. The happy days when a mild interest in good works and a moderate familiarity with the armed forces of the Crown sufficed for royalty are more than half a century away. It was so easy to be charming when life held little more than a few guards of honour to inspect and a few wards in hospitals to walk through.
But modern royalty ' has far more than that to think of—the heavy industries, afforestation, ship- yards, the stricken coalfields, salesmanship, the grind of poverty, the good name of Britain in foreign countries, welfare work, the cost of living, and a whole sea of problems that are more generally to be found on the agenda of Board meetings than in the thinner air of Courts and camps. (One sees King Edward somewhere in the picture with almost all of them.) Contemporary life has grown almost intolerably .civilian ; and even on its higher levels it cannot be conducted without a wider range of know- ledge than is customary among Field-Marshals.
Full recognition has been given to that fact in the range and diversity of the new King's training. For, admirably lacking in routine, it has effectually multiplied his contacts with almost every drab activity that goes to make up the common round of England. He has heard engineers talk shop, listened to experts planning assaults on foreign markets, and. watched the slow alleviation of maladjustments in the workers' lives. The higher salesmanship, group migration, and the mysterious processes by which frozen credits may be thawed have all passed before him ; 'and few men have been vouchsafed a more commanding survey of the whole roaring, creaking, smoky rattle- trap of affairs and industry which goes by the name of England. If it is the business of a modern king to hear and know about such things as that, there is not a more modern king in Europe.
But, happily or not, England is not the only place of which he has to be king ; and in the wider field he has rare advantages, since he has been a persever- ing traveller. If it is an advantage to have seen the world as very few have seen it, he enjoys it to the full. A sight (and he has had more than one) of North and South America, Africa, India, and the Dominions is a generous education in quite a number of things that we are not customarily taught at home, and he has had the chance to learn them all. That is another means by. which his years have been augmented in the same process which enabled him to serve his country overseas in foreign markets and the Dominions.
What is the sum of it ? A modern king with a far wider range of contacts than any of his subjects and a complete awareness of .their. real occupations and the problems which confront their country ; a sharp questioner and a shrewd listener of 'wide experience ; a busy mind that finds its own solutions and prefers to say the things that it has thought Of ftir itself ; a man of innumerable and diverse friend- ships ; and the last man in England to desire to hear smooth things on serious affairs.
Small wonder that, if there were no monarchy, he would be the uncrowned King of England.
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