TOPICS OF THE DAY.
ENGLISH LOYALTY.
nenthusiastic reception promised by London to the rince of Wales and his bride seems to have astonished ordinary observers and the Court in about an equal degree. The former remark, with a naiveté almost comic in the igno- rance it displays of Great Britain, that " there is loyalty left, then, in England, after all." The latter seem simply bewil- dered, and as if unable to comprehend, far less reciprocate, the outburst of joyous cordiality. They seem not to feel that the nation is expressing—rudely and inartistically, perhaps, but still with a generous heartiness—its sympathy with the well-being of the dynasty whom they serve, and have dis- played a want of tact not usual in those who compose a Court. They fancied at first pretty clearly that the transit through London ought not to be a royal procession, pared away guards, and reduced the Prince's cortege down to a poor six carriages. Then they wanted those carriages to drive through two millions of people as fast as horses could trot—an arrange- ment which, had it been persisted in, would have ended in London throwing open its shutters and turning to occu- pation more profitable than gazing at galloping steeds. Fortunately, the historic rights of the City intervened, and the procession was re-cast ; but even then the Lord Chamberlain could hardly bring himself to write civilly to the citizens whose warm respect for their Sovereign had upset all his arrangements. Their feeling mattered little to him, perhaps; but might have remembered that the Queen has, in a long reign, never once visibly failed in graciousness to her people ; and once, on the departure of the Princess Royal, increased the public regard by waiving for their sakes both etiquette and convenience. A trot in a snowstorm might have been forgiven a lady seated in an open carriage, and weighed down with the grief of parting ; but it was wisely prohibited. The arrangements, however, at last, have been brought within the rules of royal etiquette—rules as binding upon the dynasty as upon the peopleand, we doubt not, a few hours after these lines are read, the future Lady of England will have received such a welcome as England alone could afford.
The deep annoyance expressed at the apparent failure in courtesy illustrates very curiously the character and the sources of modern English loyalty. It is not precisely the personal sentiment which poets love to describe, and which Burke, perhaps, had in his mind when he talked of the " cheap defence of nations," apropos of the feeling which the French noblesse did not show towards Marie Antoinette. Still less is it that semi-worship which is felt in oriental countries towards the terrestrial providence who happens to be on the throne, which, except in Turkey, is abstracted from all dynastic ideas, and which is quite consis- tent with frequent and sanguinary revolutions. It is, as a permanent feeling, compounded of two nearly related but by no means identical ideas—a deep and active con- viction of the benefits springing from a limited monarchy, and an equally deep but more passive admission that the existing dynasty and that monarchy exactly suit one another. Republicanism, which in one form or another has a party in every Continental state, has in England not fifty theoretic adherents, and probably not five of them would, were the power in their hands, do more than declaim on the value of American institutions. During the present reign these ideas, which are lasting, and which are the safety of the dynasty, though not of the individual king, have been deepened inde- finitely by the personal popularity—a popularity frequently rising to devotion and love—of the present becupant of the throne. Her place in the national household has become that of the mother, and loyalty among freemen can have no higher expression. Its basis, however, is dynastic—a rooted though half-conscious conviction that the greatness and the liberties of England are bound up with the constitutional rights and the political character of the House which Englishmen have at last forgotten to call the House of Hanover. There is therefore almost as much readiness to welcome the Prince of Wales and his elected bride as to wel- come the Queen herself, and any coldness to them is almost equally felt as a slight to the national dignity. The critics, and they are not so uncommon as might be sup- posed, who think it a little absurd that a nation should turn out to welcome an untried ruler, and a bride of whom it knows nothing, except that she is fair, :misrepresent the facts of the case. The dynasty is not untried, or its representative,.and it is to both, in the heir of both, that the nation offers a greeting, which includes a cordial welcome and a promise of cordial homage. There is not a trace of the servility which some Liberals seem to attach to the idea of loyalty in the whole de- monstration. In the very midst of its preparations a faint suspicion of slight roused all London to a jealous, perhaps even over-jealous, assertion of self-respect. If the Prince were to-morrow in debt he would be criticized just as freely, restrained from more debt just as severely, as if London had never indulged in a fever of gratulatory respect. If he headed a party he would be resisted just as cavalierly as if the people had never recognized him as the hope of a line which, as his father once said, reigns by the people's choice.
The benefits of a demonstration such as that of to-day seem to the steadiest thinkers beyond the reach of argument. It shortens the links which connect the people and the throne. It informs all foreign nations that the relation between Englishmen and their princes is not one of secret suspicion, still less of that dangerous " armistice" by which the Xing of Prussia describes his attitude towards his subjects. It brings the monarchy home to classes to whom it might else become an abstraction, and reminds millions how closely one family is linked into the Constitution to which they owe, and believe they owe, their freedom and their prosperity. The mass of mankind may be capable of devotion to mere abstractions— the American idolatry of the Constitution seems to prove that they are—but they are much more easily moved to reverence towards a person. They want to embody their thoughts, and to make that embodiment of them a pleasant one, pleasant to eyes and memories, is a most important end. Historians say that Louis XVI. twice lost his chance of safety because he seemed to his people undignified, and even the throne of Great Britain will be none the less secure because this genera- tion will retain a pleasant remembrance of the Prince's entry on public life.
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