Germany. We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to German
colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of
dangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things American
has died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, as
any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and
'eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not to
forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must
never recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after
the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of British
kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability
of King Edward VII. He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he had
essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored
good will between France and Great Britain. It is no slight upon his
successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present
opportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward could
have handled them.

Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it must
speedily undergo the profoundest modification. The old state of affairs
cannot continue. The European dynastic system, based upon the
intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead
to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas.
It is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolution in Russia, the
setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the
East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into
world politics--these things slam the door on any idea of working back
to the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. "No peace
with the Hohenzollerns" is a cry that carries with it the final
repudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure you
he wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the present
the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the
common talk of men. Kant's lucid thought told us long ago that the peace
of the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplace
remark now in every civilized community.

The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday
needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march
irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic
republicanism. The ques