their hard-fought controversies, detached from party, and
attached only to the common interest, they had in the late King an
arbiter ripe in experience, judicial in temper, and at once a reverent
worshipper of their traditions, and a watchful guardian of their
constitutional liberties." King Edward's life as a devotee of duty, as a
sportsman in the best sense of the word, as an ardent and discriminating
patron of the arts, as a good business man at the head of a great
business community, possessed of intuitive shrewdness in the management
of men and difficult situations, as a keen social reformer with "no self
apart from his people," was then dwelt upon. It would be impossible in
any limited space to analyze the views of the British press. The _Times_
declared that "his people loved him for his honesty and kindly courtesy.
To all he was not merely every inch a King but every inch an English
King and an English gentleman. His influence was not the same as that of
Queen Victoria, but in some respects it was almost stronger." The _Daily
Mail_ considered that "to his initiative his subjects and the Empire
owe the pacification of South Africa and the final reconciliation with
the Boers. The system of understandings with foreign powers which is our
security to-day was in a great part his handiwork." To the Radical
_Daily News_ he was "the supreme example of a people's King by common
consent" and this the Liberal _Morning Leader_ echoed with a further
tribute to "the sheer instinctive deference paid to his proved wisdom,
his large-minded statesmanship, his unequaled knowledge of the world,
and the tact that never failed him in the greatest or the least
occasion."

A notable incident of this first week of mourning, during which the
people were waiting to pay their final tribute of loyal sympathy on the
day of the Royal interment, was the unanimous Resolution of the
Legislature of Quebec. Coming from a French-Canadian people, amongst
whom special interest had been aroused by King Edward's creation of the
_entente cordiale_ with France, something earnest and sympathetic as
well as loyal in expression might have been expected and, if so, the
hope was certainly realized. The Legislature in its address to King
George V. (May 10th) put the feelings of the people of the Province in
the following expressive words:

"We mourn the loss in him of a monarch whose chief aim was to draw
all the nations closer together and to prom