the longest reign in English history lends
point to a question asked by Mr. James Bryce in a book published more
than twenty years ago--Why has the most obvious service a monarch can
render been so strangely neglected? When the present King visited the
South of Ireland as Prince of Wales in 1885, at a time when Mr. Charles
Parnell's prestige was at its zenith, he was greeted with the half
humorous sally--"We will have no Prince but Charley," which at any rate
contrasts favourably with the shouts of "Popish Ned," which his alleged
sympathy with the popular side evoked on his visit a few years later to
Londonderry.

The trivial fact that the English National Anthem was drowned at the
degree day of the Royal University a few years ago by the fact that the
students insisted on singing "God Save Ireland" at the end of a ceremony
which even in the decorous surroundings of the Sheldonian and the Senate
House is marked by a large amount of disrespectful licence, nevertheless
provided the _Times_ and the Unionist Press in general, for several days
with a text upon which they hung their leading articles in the
exploitation of their favourite theme, but no attention has been drawn
in these quarters to the periodical threat of Orange exponents of a
contingent loyalty to "throw the Crown into the Boyne" as a protest
against the various assaults which have been made upon their prerogative
by Parliament, and no mention was made in the English Press of the fact
that on the day of the postponement of the coronation, owing to the
illness of the King, the organ of the "disloyalists"--the _Freeman's
Journal_--ended its leading article with the words "God Save the King,"
which were a mere expression of the feelings of the bulk of its readers.

Loyalty, said Swift, is the foible of the Irish people, and it is a
remarkable fact, in spite of the detestable insult to their religious
views which the law exacts from the Sovereign at his accession, that the
popular welcome accorded to his Majesty, on the part of individuals,
should remove any ground for the suggestion that the Crown, which
Grattan always declared was an Imperial Crown, is viewed with any animus
in Ireland.

That public bodies as such refuse to offer addresses of welcome is due
to a conviction that to do so would be interpreted as an abdication of
the popular position, an acquiescence in the _status quo_, a recognition
of the system of government of which the Sovereign is head;