The _Sunday Express_ gave the widest possible publicity to its serialization of the autobiography of the Duchess of Windsor, an opus that, although interesting, cannot be considered an enthusiastic recommendation for the institution of monarchy. The inevitable conclusion is that William Maxwell Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, New Brunswick, and Cherkley, nurses crypto-republican sentiments at heart. He has confessed to being a propagandist in his newspapers, and he is so unpredictable that he might sometime direct all his energies against the institution. I mentioned this to a cabinet minister, who replied that the monarchy would welcome it. "Nothing helps a politician more than the enmity of the Beaver," he commented. Although republicanism is no longer an issue in the Labor Party, the party itself contains a strong element that is hostile to the monarchy. Yet neither the _Daily Mirror_ nor the _Daily Herald_, the journalistic pillars of the left, snipe quite so often or so accurately as the Beaverbrook press. The _New Statesman and Nation_ does. Its indirect attacks on royalty are based on establishing a link between royalty and the wealthy, showy, and, of course, non-socialist world of London's fashionable West End. The _New Statesman_'s complaint, delivered in the tones of a touring schoolmarm who has been pinched by a lascivious Latin, is that the Queen should use her influence to halt ostentatious spending on debutante parties and the revels of the young. Its anonymous editorial-writer was severe with young people who drink too much (although abstinence has never been particularly popular on the left) and generally whoop it up. The editorial ended with a hint that the Queen would have to exercise some restraint when a Labor government came to power. Despite such criticisms and warnings, the monarchy pursues its course virtually unchallenged. One reason for the lack of a serious political challenge may be that the monarchy is not now identified with a rich, powerful, and coherent aristocracy, as it was a century ago, but with the ordinary citizen. Then, too, there are many who look to the royal family as an example. Long ago a compositor in a London newspaper, a good union man and a Socialist, explained this attitude. "I'd rather have my two daughters reading about the Queen and all that stuff than reading those magazines about the flicks. Who'd you want your daughter to follow, Lana Turner or the Queen?" So we return again to the indefinable and powerful tie that binds people and Crown. Perhaps it is a sense of historical identity experienced as the Queen rides past, carrying with her the atmosphere of other Englands. Here before the eyes of her people is a reassurance of survival, an example of continuity. This is one of those periods in history when the British need reassuring.