ven seen the Monarch in whose personal character there was sometimes
little to evoke or deserve such faith and sacrifice. For ages this
loyalty had been the preservative of society in England, and it is still
indispensable to the tranquility and permanence of a state, whether
given in its full degree to the Sovereign of Great Britain, or in a more
divided sense to the elective and partisan head of a modern republic.

In the time of the Georges, as well as in the middle ages and at the
present moment, loyalty was and is a sincere and honest patriotism,
refining the instincts and elevating the actions of those who were
willing to waive self-interest on any given occasion in order to guard
what they believed to be the true basis of national stability and order.
Certainly, a Monarchy which could survive the wars and European
revolutions, the internal discontents and personal deficiencies, of the
period which commenced with the reign of George I. and closed with that
of William IV., must have possessed some inherent strength greater than
may be gathered from many of the superficial works which pass for
history. But, whatever that influence was, it does not appear to have
been personal. With the close of the reign of Queen Anne the brilliant
_prestige_ of personal authority and power wielded by the Sovereign had
passed quietly away and, up to the death of William IV. and the
accession of Victoria, had not been replaced by the personal influence
of a constitutional ruler.

PRESENT POSITION OF THE MONARCHY

Out of all these changing developments has come a military position in
which the Sovereign no longer leads his forces in war but in which he
commands a sentiment of loyalty as hearty, in the breasts of the
Colonial soldiers ten thousand miles away from his home at Windsor, as
ever did the personal presence of an Edward I., or a Richard the
Lion-Hearted. Out of them has come a religious position in which the
Sovereign is head of a particular Church and yet, as such, gives no
serious offence to masses of his subjects who belong to other faiths and
who receive through his Governments around the world absolute freedom of
religious worship--almost as a matter of course. Out of the
constitutional evolution has come the adaptation of the Monarchy to not
only new conditions but to countries separated by oceans and continents
from the mother-state, and the evolution of a system which combines
420,000,000 people under one Crown an