THE QUEEN'S SONS.
Wk, congratulate Baron de Worms. Like Mr. Ashmead- Bartlett, Sir Drummond Wolff, and others of that type, he is always trying to draw attention to himself, and this week he has succeeded. His rather impudent attempt to patronise, or, to use official slang, to " protect " the Duke of Albany, raises a question of considerable social interest and great political importance, and Baron de Worms will be talked of in all London Clubs. The Member for Greenwich has heard, and according to the Daily News has heard accurately, that the Agent-General for Canada, presumably under some authority from his Government, asked the Duke of Albany to accept the Viceroyalty of the Dominion ; that his Royal High- ness was favourable to the project, and that it broke down through the reluctance of the Ministry to agree to the nomi- nation. Baron de Worms sees in that account a means of making Mr. Gladstone appear to have refused a Royal request— which, in the eyes of the nouveaux riches and of all suburban respectability, is worse than blasphemy—and he is accordingly, on Monday, to ask the Premier whether he has seen the state- ment, and whether it is true. If it is not true the matter drops, and Baron de Worms will have the satisfaction of feel- ing that he tried to do a service to the Royal Family not likely to be forgotten ; while if, as we rather presume, it is true, a discussion may be raised as to the manner in which the Liberals, " out of secret dislike to the Monarchy, have thrown away a grand opportunity of conciliating all Conservative and Im- perial instincts in Canada." The stroke would really have
been very clever in Baron de Worms, if the ten-pounders had been ruling, and though, under household suffrage, it will pro- bably cost him his seat, there are others, say, Kidderminster, in which an Austrian Baron will be a most acceptable candidate.
If the Ministry have refused to make the Duke of Albany Viceroy of Canada, they have done a public service, all the more to be noted by the electors because there is no personal objection to Prince Leopold. He is the most thoughtful and cultivated of his House, he would understand his rather anomalous position as the moderator of an avowed democracy, and he possesses the power of adequate expression, which Royal personages, trained as they are to a sort of mental stutter, are so apt to lack. Were he a little older, he would not, as far as he himself is concerned, make a bad Viceroy; but even were he fifty, and abler even than he is, he would be a most
injudicious selection. The appointment would establish a precedent which could do nothing but mischief. No son of the Queen, however able, could, in the nature of things, make a good British Viceroy. The secret of British management in the great Colonies, and in a less degree in India, is that the Viceroy, or Governor, or Commissioner is an Ambassador ; that he re- presents in an effective way the Central Government, and that he responds easily, quickly, and with untiring tact to any hint from home. To be certain of complete hold on him, to be sure that he will feel censure and desire reward, is of the last importance, not only to this or that Government, but to the Imperial system. A Governor who is self-willed is a nuisance, but a Governor who is too strong for his place may be a calamity. A Prince is always too strong for his place. Half our Military troubles proceed from the difficulty a Cabinet feels in snubbing or removing the Duke of Cambridge as it would snub or remove any non-Royal Field-Marshal, and a Prince as Viceroy would be stronger even than Prince George. He would not be so well known to the electors at home, would be more easily defended in Parliament, and would be much less afraid of comments in the newspapers. We have, as it is, to choose War Ministers because they have -back- bone, but backbone never can be put into the Colonial Office, which feels always that it has endless enemies and few defenders. It would be nearly impossible to control a Royal Viceroy, and in Canada, in India, or, worst of all, in Ireland, he might do irreparable mischief, before the Queen would consent to the affront to her family involved in his recall. Indeed, we need not take Canada, with its relations to the great and sensitive Republic, or India, with its wars always visible in the horizon, or Ireland, with its sources of political despair, as illustrations. A much smaller example will suffice a great deal better. Imagine a Prince, and worst of all, a Prince with an ambition to do something creditable in the world, in the position of Sir Bartle Frere in South Africa. It was difficult enough to remove that rhetorical Anglo-Indian, with his undying favour in high quarters ; but if the Prince had been in his place, his removal would have been impossible, the Transvaal would have been subjugated, and the British flag would have been flying up to the banks of the Zambesi. So much the better, Tories may say, with their simple belief that Englishmen, if only of the caste, could govern the world without soldiers, and we may, to save trouble, grant their proposition ; but then, that is not the country's will. Our contention is not that a Prince cannot govern—he may be perfectly well able to govern, though, happily for us all, that has not happened among the German branch of the Stuarts who have presided over us so well—but that the country has the right to govern, and intends to govern, and cannot govern him. The Prince, brain for brain, is probably just as qualified as Lord Lansdowne, and might be more so ; but the necessary qualification for such a position is not only fitness, but amenability to a control without which the Empire would go to pieces. It would die of the constant jar between its own aspirations and those of its lieutenants. Baron de Worms would be furious, if compelled to appoint agents who did not fear him, to whom he could offer no promotion, and who considered hints impertinencies ; but that is the pre- cise position in which he thinks it discreet and even advan- tageous to place the Government of the United Kingdom. The experiment is too dangerous for modern statesmen.
But, we shall be told, in appointing the Queen's Sons to Vice-royalties, we are doing our best to reconcile colonists to the British system to spread among them a liking for Courts, and to diffuse a tolerance for that organisation of social dispari- ties which, for good or evil, has so long been established in
England, and which, if it has impaired many virtues, has not been inconsistent with success in the world. That, no doubt, was the idea by which Lord Beaconsfield would have defended his avowed, though inchoate project of planting the Queen's sons about everywhere as Viceroys ; and he may have believed in it, for he was capable of believing anything into which the notion of pedigree could enter. Baron de Worms, for what we know, may believe it, too. We are conscious of a certain irritation at seeing these German " Barons," strong in their wealth and in the favour of their great tribe, trying to interfere in our national politics, and it may be we are unjust to the convictions of the Member for Greenwich. But his possible sincerity on the social side of his mind makes no difference. The potting-out of Princes in Colonial gardens, however scientifically done, will not alter the character of the soil. Emigrant Englishmen are Republicans at heart, and in trying to set up mock Courts, and an aristocracy with no roots in history, we do but foster that radical difference of sentiment which, sooner or later, produces separation. Colonists love a Lord and worship a Prince, and when their wives are ordered to wear low dresses and long trains in order to be "received," defiantly disobey. The sentiment of courtiership, the true bend in the back, is not in them. It would be as sensible to expect to " foster " Colonial Establishments, with Bishops in the Legislatures, or to order a Colony to be divided into what Sir Rainald Knight- ley considers the "natural divisions of the soil." The man who thinks that the Dominion of Canada will some day become a kingdom, and the great landowners Prairie Peers, knows nothing of history, and very little indeed of emigrant human nature. It is not only Englishmen who reject Monarchy beyond seas. Spaniards are not democrats by instinct, but, after eighty years of Republican failures, what Spanish- American dreams of summoning Bourbon cadets to reign over him ? The Mexicans shot a King as competent personally as a people are likely to find. If Prince Leopold were appointed Viceroy, the only result would be that he would be the target for every Irish dynamiteur, that the Queen's heart would be broken with suspense and anxiety, and that the con- fidence which Viceroys should feel while honestly doing their work would be irretrievably destroyed. Nor, for on such a subject concealment is unworthy, if Lord Beaconsfield's idea were as sound as we believe it to be unsound, should we admit that a Liberal Ministry would be in the right in appropriating it. It is not the business of the British Government to plant the British social system in all its Colonies. That system is historical here, and, therefore, endurable—or, if Tories please, excellent—and certainly is approved by the people ; but it is not a good one in itself, and but for tradition it would not last. Millions of workers, guided by some ten thousand wealthy, and reigned over, if not governed, by a single family, is not a social ideal which it is at any hazard our duty to diffuse. And that it is a hazard, is unquestionable. Once appoint an excellent and thoughtful young Prince, because he is a Prince, to be Viceroy of Canada or Australia, and some day we may find it impossible to resist the nomination of a Duke of Cumberland, or a Frederic, Prince of Wales.
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