The chief factor in this development was the late Queen Victoria, and to the inheritance of the fabric thus evolved came a son who was educated amid the constitutional environment in which she lived and was trained in the Imperial ideas which she so strongly held and so wisely impressed upon her statesmen, her family and her people. King Edward came into responsibilities which were greater and more imposing than those ever before inherited by a reigning sovereign. He had not only the great example and life of his predecessor as a model and as a comparison; not only the same vast and ever-changing and expanding Empire to rule over; not only a similar myriad-eyed press and public to watch his every expression and movement; but he entered with his people upon a new century in which one of the first and most prominent features is a decay in popular respect for Parliament and a revival of the old-time love for stately display, for ceremonial and for the appropriate trappings of royalty. With this evident and growing influence of the Crown as a social and popular factor is the knowledge which all statesmen and constitutional students now possess of the personal influence in diplomacy and statecraft which was wielded by the late Queen Victoria and which the experience and tact of the new Monarch enabled him to also test and prove. Side by side with these two elements in the situation was the conviction which has now become fixed throughout the Empire that the Crown is the pivot upon which its unity and future co-operation naturally and properly turns; that the Sovereign is the one possible central figure of allegiance for all its scattered countries and world-wide races; that without the Crown as the symbol of union and the King as the living object of allegiance and personal sentiment the British realms would be a series of separated units.