It makes the English Royal Family the most popularly revered in Europe, even though it has, of all the royal families, the least governmental power to compel awe, and has no English blood in it to endear it to the nation, and is allowed not even a pretence of leadership in peace or war to make it picturesque. When I attended Queen Victoria’s jubilee, about a year after my first meeting with her, it seemed as if the whole nation had poured itself into the streets of London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her succession to the throne. And if one were sceptical, it might be said that they were only to come to enjoy the spectacle and to rejoice in the display of their own national magnificence. But the celebration had all the evidences of a personal tribute, and it was undoubtedly so accepted by the Queen and her family. King Edward, who was a man of the world not easily deceived, always seemed to have this conviction of his importance in the eyes of his people. I do not know to what extent he interested himself privately in the problems of their government, from which the Royal Family is so jealously excluded; certainly, in years of familiar acquaintance with him, I never once heard him refer to them. Yet he was a man whose intellect would have been of value to his country, for he was one of the cleverest sovereigns of Europe, a striking personality, genial and shrewd. It seemed a pity that such a brain should be wasted in the idleness of royal life after it had succeeded in developing itself in spite of the restrictions that make most royal brains so dull. Coming first to England from the animations of the South, I thought the people looked as stupefied as if they were all just recovering from a fit; and I felt the same general blank of reserved dulness among the aristocratic and official circles that surrounded the Court. It seemed a country that was not ruled by intelligence but by property. Property is a blind master, and great masses of the people were already rotted out by a poverty and industrial oppression from which any governing intelligence would have protected them. It took the fiasco of the Boer War, and the strikes and internal disorders of the last few years, to awaken the nation from its stupor of imperial complacency. Since that time there has been a great appearance of revolt and reform; and I have been interested to hear the foreign speculation on the probable fate of the throne in the final issue of the upheaval. I should like to know what power the British throne still has of which the country could deprive it, or what liberty the people could acquire by its abolition! They would gain as little as if, by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their Zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages now can only give a pleasurable holiday-shudder of awe--of which, I think, the nation will not willingly deprive itself.