TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ILLNESS OF THE PRINCE OF WALES.
POLITICS have been shadowed, and indeed.overshadowed, this week by the grave illness of the Prince of Wales, now, it is hoped, beginning to abate. It has created in every corner of the kingdom, and among every class, from the highest to the lowest, a degree of anxiety and regret which observers who do not know England, and who mistake the moods of her people for their permanent impressions, would find it difficult to explain. The truth is, we believe, that there is neither mistake nor sham in the matter, that the people are anxious and are regretful, that the infinite majority of them distinctly care as much about the Prince as they do about any except their closest relatives, and that their care is of the cordially friendly kind. In a land of gossipers gossip makes
very little impression. While there is no trace in this country that we can discover of loyalty to the House of Brunswick as a clan, none of that feeling which in Prussia attaches to all the Hohenzollerns and in France once attached to all the Bourbons, the body of the people of all classes and all opinions, the Republican opinion included, sincerely wish well to the Sovereign and her Heir, would rather hear good news of them than bad, would undergo considerable sacrifice to change bad news into good. For good or evil, the Sovereign who reigns and the Sovereign who is to reign are identified with the people, and even those who would to-morrow gladly see England changed into a Commonwealth, sympathize with their well-being, feel pained when they suffer, and hurt when they are aspersed. The two figures always above the horizon are never forgotten, are part of their daily lives, are as much liked in a quiet, passive, but very unchangeable way, as hills in the prospect or splendid pieces of architecture in the city. Who does not care if York Minster is in flames ? Add to this feeling, which is universal, permanent, and inde- pendent of prepossessions, the mystic influence still exercised over millions by the Kingship, the pity born of the contrast between such hopes and such a possible termination of them, the future King of a fifth of the human race prostrated by the disease which the popular mind associates—wrongly- with poverty and wretchedness, and the definite per- sonal affection felt by the people for the Princess Alex- andra, and we have ample explanation of the public excitement, of the warmth of sentiment which has gone out towards Sandringham, of the swift extinction of that very thin and vapoury " unpopularity " under which the Prince of Wales was sometimes supposed to labour. Megrims of that kind soon disperse under a shock, and though some of the daily papers, with more morality than grace, took advan- tage of the opportunity to preach sermons nearly as grotesque as those with which field preachers improve an occasion, the public feeling was instinctively one of commiseration without reserves.
One reason for the depth of the feeling expressed was undoubtedly the apprehensive and, as it seems, exaggerated view which the public took of the case. People dread typhoid fever extremely, and disbelieve official bulletins utterly. It was thought that the physicians were making the best of things, remembered that they did so in the ease of the Prince Consort, and believed that the Queen, who alone would be informed of the precise truth, was exceedingly alarmed. The alarm was increased by the kind of courtier-like reticence which is de vigueur on these occasions, but which no more prevents the circulation of sensational rumours than the secrecy of a Cabi- net prevents gossip about the discords among its members. And although the bulletins were, as is now seen, carefully exact, and the danger may even be considered past—though the disease has still many days to run—enteric fever, a fever which, so to speak, may barn holes in the intestines, is always a serious affair, involving quite as much danger as any disease of slow course possibly can, always must make hope shadowy, and always must suggest the gravest possibilities as to its termination. And although the people thought of none of those things, but were agitated with a higher, because more instinctive, sympathy and good- will, it was impossible for politicians to forget that a Prince of Wales, though without function under the Constitution, though debarred from the work of administration, shut out from politics, and almost refused the possibility of a career, is still by the mere fact of his existence a great political personage, the pivot of a system which cannot be disturbed without violent oscillations. There can be no chance allowed of a vacancy in the British Throne, and a bad instead of a good turn in that fever might have changed the whole current of political pre- occupations. The Queen has been so seldom visited with dangerous illness, men have become so accustomed to rely on the strong young life of her Heir—a man who can ride across country for a whole day and preside at a great dinner after- wards—they have so frequently discussed the numbers of
George M.'s descendants—now quite a clan of themselves—that they have forgotten that although there are a score of lives in the succession, only two lives stand be- tween them and the ill-omened phrase, "a Regency ;" that had. the Prince not recovered, the purpose of the forthcoming Session might have been changed, and all, other work, however imperative, thrust aside for a Regency Bill, with its consequent sterile debates, and factious contests, and weary efforts to return to first principles, and remodel everything, just at the moment when the one necessity is to keep the machine going smoothly. There is no conceivable task which could just now be thrust upon a Ministry which would, harass them like a Regency Bill, no topic of discussion which could call up such passion, which is so embarrassed by his- torical difficulties, or which could afford such an opportunity for enemies of order and the continuity of things. And yet a, Regency Bill might have been an inevitable precaution against a headless kingdom or a Convention Parliament. There can hardly have been a Member of Parliament whose anxiety for the Prince has not been deepened by dread of these things, and who will not feel a sense of political relief as deep as his personal pleasure when assured that this apprehension may be finally laid aside, that the line of the English Sovereigns, end when it may, is in no risk till it ends of accidental suspension. Of course no such assurance can be given yet, but it is clear from, all narratives that the fever is uncomplicated, that it does not weaken the patient in any unexpected degree, and that the Prince, in fact, inherits the strong vitality of the Royal line, rather than his father's exceptional predisposition to suffer from this type of disease. An illness, however long or severe, matters little in comparison with an attack which cannot ba shaken off, and humanly speaking, the balance of evidence indicates that it is only an illness which has called out the sympathy of the nation, and, for the moment at least, suppressed an agitation which threatened to add one more to the obstacles in the way of permanent progress.
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