Eight days later, on the 11th October, early in the morning, the heart of England turned for a moment to her old harbour of Portsmouth, where, through one of her own October fogs, her great battle-cruiser was drawing majestically into port, bringing home from his second journey to kinsfolk the eldest son of her Royal House. Perhaps the heart of England felt a certain pride.... XXVI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TOUR This Chapter is, by kind permission, largely reproduced from an article by the writer published in the "Nineteenth Century" of December, 1920. "The tumult and the shouting dies," and what, now that it is over, remains to Britain of the enterprise? What treasure came back in the _Renown_ to make this Royal adventure worth while? The word may be disputed. The nation's heir, it may be said, does not adventure in travelling to the hearths of kinsfolk. There is no adventure in a voyage surrounded by every means of safety and comfort that modern science can devise, a voyage backed by the blessing and sped by the hope and pride of this sound old Mother Country. Yet in the fluid state of social and political emotion to-day it was an adventure, a challenge in the very teeth of those unbridled forces that are so blatant and busy in the disservice of the British Empire, and a challenge before which not one of them raised its head. The constantly recurring scene of the Prince making acquaintance with overseas audiences is long since familiar. It has been depicted in the columns of hundreds of newspapers and actually thrown before the eyes of thousands in cinemas. It is far more than a twice-told tale that His Royal Highness was everywhere received with enthusiasm which was altogether phenomenal, that he was everywhere able to draw the whole of the inhabitants of the places he visited away from their business, their occupation or their pleasure, to concentrate during the time he was amongst them, the whole of their attention and interest upon himself, and the idea of race, Empire and loyalty for which he stands. In so far as the hackneyed words of newspaper reports can produce that effect, their reiteration must by now have turned the remarkable scenes of his progress into a kind of Royal commonplace, and retired them into the back of the popular imagination as matters to be taken for granted. It is difficult to put into terms of flags and decorations, patriotic songs and calculated multitudes, however gay and hoarse and unexampled, anything of the fine essence discharged from men's hearts and minds that made the soul of these occasions. Only perhaps to those who actually saw them will they survive conventional description, as experiences of the rare sort that baffle it. It did not seem to matter who his audiences were. Keen, sharp American business men with square jaws and shrewd eyes, to whom a Prince would necessarily hover somewhere between a figure of mediaeval romance and a comic anachronism, proved no less