Nor should sight be lost of the immense services which the Sovereign may render to British interests abroad. Shifting administrations encourage various hopes in foreign powers. The Crimean War was an outcome of such renewed aspirations. Our foreign policy lacks the strength of continuity, and its changefulness seems ineradicable from our party system. It is, therefore, of high importance that European courts should be able to count on certain limits which they know that a monarch whom they respect is likely to maintain. Such a consciousness of finality enables foreign Governments to moderate the popular clamour often worked up by dishonest agitation, and the more obstinate because purposely misinformed. The Crown can thus become a great conciliator,[112] and sometimes a preventer of actual war. The affinities of the blood royal to continental dynasties are not so cogent, though their material aid as sources of inner information is manifest. But as guarantees of amity they often prove comparatively helpless, unless supported by the recognition of character, tact, and abilities, for which the nurture of every British prince should fit him, and which entitle him to appeal to every differing headship of peoples abroad, as well as to the originally alien ingredients of empire at home. The British Sovereign may well be called the Member for the Empire. On these aspects Disraeli often dwelt; and at a period when, for these objects, the comparatively small expense was affected to be grudged by a set of extreme politicians, his analysis proved its cheapness in proportion to the cost of large democracies and republics. A great outcry was raised when, twenty-seven years ago, Disraeli made the startling move of appealing alike to the Hindoo and the Mohammedan sentiment by investing Queen Victoria with a title which has impressed India with the grandeur of Great Britain. To the Oriental the style of a white queen meant as little as to the queen of the Ansaries, so humorously depicted in _Tancred_. It was well said of Disraeli by Lord Salisbury, in the speech which commemorated his death, that zeal for the greatness of England had eaten him up; and zeal, as Disraeli observed in an Irish speech of 1844, is rare enough in these days. Never was a stroke more justified by its results. Like the purchase of the Suez Canal shares, equally justified, it was bitterly and blindly assailed. “Bastard imperialism” was the refrain of the Opposition. No one knew on what sacred ark the Machiavellian finger might next be laid.