to her Generals: least of all to Gladstone for going on a yachting cruise to Denmark without asking her permission. The Prime Minister,' she writes to poor Granville, and especially one NOT gifted with prudence in speech-is not a person who can go about where he likes with impunity'; especially when he is also a person, as she write to the same correspondent on another occasion, who never will consider the effect of all his constant shiftings and changes on the country and on the whole world.' Gladstone in reply makes confession and promises never to offend again, and even perceives that there might be reason for her fears that his innocent conversations about the weather with foreign Sovereigns would be suspected abroad of having in fact been concerned with very different subjects. She proved right, in fact, for such suspicions were entertained, to our disadvantage. But he cannot have liked receiving such rebukes at his age and in his position; and still less, perhaps, hearing that she had angrily described his little voyage as his 'escapade.' More annoying still, probably, were her frequent letters of advice not to make so many speeches, though she politely gilded the pill by references to the need of curing his hoarseness and taking care of his health. If he must speak he had better say 'a few words discouraging wild and extravagant notions' which 'would have an excellent effect.' So, again, she wishes him to dissociate himself entirely from 'visionaries who excite the people's hopes by promises of what is impracticable and dangerous.'

The interest of all this is not merely personal and biographical; it is practical, and raises a public issue of the first importance. What is the true function of the Sovereign in a Constitutional Monarchy? The first, truest, and most permanent part of the answer to that question hardly applies to Queen Victoria, for it refers to duties which she always disliked and generally neglected. The Sovereign is the only person who can ideally fill the first place in national ceremonies of every kind because the only person who is of no rank or class or party, but raised above all, embracing all and the head of all. But the Queen hated appearing in public; she never even showed herself at the proroguing of Parliament, and seldom at its opening. She lived, as far as

she could, a private life and, as far as she could, threw away her privilege of being the visible representative of the English people, the person in whom all saw the embodiment of all the national affections, both memories of the past and dreams of the future. She did, indeed, become, with little direct effort on her part, by the length of her reign and the goodness of her character, a sort of invisible spirit of the whole race, a remote and semi-deified Empress whom the white man reverenced and the coloured man worshipped. And, in so becoming, she unawares laid the foundations of the new and free Empire and created a new kind of Monarchy. But that was not what we see her here consciously aiming at. It was only dimly and occasionally present to her rare moments of imagination. What she really wanted was to rule the country and decide issues of policy. She was a strong-willed, industrious and, in some respects, very able woman who had been on a throne since she was eighteen, and had in her ears, not only the language of the Coronation Service, which she is sure not to have forgotten, nor that of the Prayer Book which she heard every Sunday, but many echoes of both which came to her from living voices all through her reign. It could not be easy, and it was not, for her to learn that lesson of reigning without governing, taught her by all her Ministers, but half concealed from her in her first days by the agreeableness of Melbourne, and now in these last, more completely, by the flatteries of Disraeli. So we see her writing again and again as if she had a power of command or veto over the policy of her Ministers. 'I will never consent,' 'I never could allow,' 'I would never give way,' and other similar expressions are not infrequent in the letters, and are launched at the heads of Ministers in respect of policies they propose to follow at home or abroad, but especially abroad, with regard to South Africa or Egypt, Russia or France or Turkey. And yet in substance-sometimes after securing modifications in form-she has of course to consent in the end. It is strange that after a long reign she had not come to see that the system which she inherited and was called upon to work was one precluding the Sovereign from deciding issues of policy. In practice she accepted it.

She never did refuse to consent. But in form

and phrase, and probably in her private will, she never would recognise it. The consequence was a series of extorted consents or surrenders which must have been very disagreeable to her. From her lofty height she naturally and justly despised popular clamour, newspaper articles, and ignorant Members of Parliament, and she expected her Ministers to do the

But she was not dependent on the support of these often foolish and ignoble powers. Her Ministers were, and even if they had wanted to carry out the policies she desired, it was often simply impossible for them to have done so. Her continual pressure influenced them, no doubt; she forced them, for instance, to alter an important telegram to Baring, and her insistence obtained for Wolseley in Egypt powers they had not at all wished to give him. But in the greatest issues she could not affect decisions. We find her angrily protesting to Granville that 'a Democratic Monarchy (as described by Mr Briggs in his address to that Communistic French Ambassador, M. Challemel-Lacour, which proceedings she thinks very objectionable) she will not consent to belong to.' But, as Parliament became more and more dependent on popular votes, that, or something very like it, is what she did in fact belong to. And it would have been a good thing if she had been more inclined to set her exceptional common sense and clear-headedness to considering how she could best play her part in it. By her dislike of being seen she had thrown away a weapon which, in the alreadybeginning days of newspapers, crowds and publicity, might have been one of enormous and almost irresistible strength, especially in the hands of a woman. She had followed the unwise practice of her predecessors, unwise for themselves and unwise for the nation, of allowing the distribution of Honours to pass almost entirely into the hands of Ministers. It would have been easy for the Crown to have insisted on retaining the strictest control over Peerages and the rest. No Minister would have dared to quarrel with the Sovereign over the refusal of a Peerage to some party hack or ambitious plutocrat. A strict retention of that control would certainly have been in the interest of the country. And it would have left a very valuable card

in the hands of the Crown in its relation with Ministers. And that it needs. Without the Crown the Empire would certainly fall to pieces. Even the unity of the various races, classes and interests which fill Great Britain would be seriously endangered. Yet it is difficult to feel confident that the Monarchy will survive if the Monarch is gradually transformed into a mere machine for registering or signing the decrees of others. It is neither possible, nor at all desirable, that the Sovereign, who in the course of nature will usually be a person of very ordinary abilities, should be able to force his political policies on Ministers and Parliaments. But it is equally undesirable that he should become a mere puppet in their hands. His remoteness, aloofness, permanence and, as it were, universality should set him freer, at any rate, than Ministers from the exigencies of party and the pressure of temporary conditions at home or abroad. To enable him to perform his duties he should have some cards in his hands. He should be able to exercise some real pressure on his Ministers. The control of Honours would have given him that. We here see the Queen exercising something of that in ecclesiastical appointments, but, curiously enough, less in lay Honours. As she, against Disraeli, had appointed Tait to the Primacy, so here, though Gladstone's ecclesiastical recommendations are far more carefully considered and made on far more honourable grounds, we find her, nevertheless, intervening in them and sometimes, as in the case of the Deanery of Westminster, substituting another name for that recommended by Gladstone. So much power she kept. But on the whole, what she had to rely upon was simply the vague dignity and prestige of the Crown. She had to be informed and consulted: and a person, especially a very august person, whom you have always to consult, will almost inevitably be a person whom you occasionally follow. That was her position. How do these letters and journals show her using it? The answer is: in the spirit of the Duke of Wellington's maxim. Her first aim, like his, is that her Government should be carried on. We have seen that she often misinterpreted her powers and rated her Ministers for doing things which they had been elected to do. And, now and then, here, we see her doing

for

something worse: going behind her Ministers, instance, to write very secret' letters to Beaconsfield, and even urging Wolseley to resist the policy of her Government, and to resign if he cannot get his way, which is also hers. But these are exceptional cases. More often we find her using her influence to induce the Opposition to be reasonable. Like the business-like woman she was, she hated party, wanted to see things carried through by reasonable concessions on all sides, and had no patience with the game played by men like Randolph Churchill, who opposed the Government irrespective of right or wrong simply for the sake of annoying the enemy and advertising themselves. So we find her sending Ponsonby in 1881 to see Beaconsfield and Northcote and 'speak to them very earnestly as to the desirability of helping Mr Gladstone' in the matter of the new rules against obstruction; and again, later on, making herself a mediator between the parties about the Land Bill and the Arrears Bill and the affair of Arabi Pasha. There are other instances of action of this sort in minor matters. But the supreme one-one of the most important acts of her reign-was the persistence with which in 1884 over the Franchise Bill, as in 1869 over the Irish Church question, she plied the leaders of both parties with remonstrances and appeals till she had got her way and prevented a deadlock between the two Houses of Parliament. Perhaps it was the most difficult, as it was one of the best, things she ever did. Neither of the two protagonists made her task easy. Gladstone, always a self-willed man, was especially so in matters that lent themselves to rhetoric and popular applause as the question of wider franchise eminently did. He was being pressed hard, too, by Radical colleagues who rather wished for a quarrel with the House of Lords. And then, as we now see, he was certainly in the wrong, which seldom makes people more reasonable. Franchise and Redistribution are clearly bound up with each other. To ask the Lords, as he did, to pass the extension of the Franchise without knowing anything about what shape Redistribution was to take was, in fact, to ask them to buy a pig in a poke or to put their heads into a noose for him to strangle them at pleasure. None of his letters or memoranda provide any plausible justification