he imagination which
exhibits itself in politics and the most unlikely places. The German
Emperor, for example, is neither a tyrant nor a lunatic, as used to be
absurdly represented; he is simply a minor poet; and he feels just as
any minor poet would feel if he found himself on the throne of
Barbarossa. The revival of militarism and ecclesiasticism is an invasion
of politics by the artistic sense; it is heraldry rather than chivalry
that is lusted after. Amid all this waving of wands and flaunting of
uniforms, all this hedonistic desire to make the most of everything,
there is something altogether quiet and splendid about the sober disdain
with which this simple and courteous lady in a black dress left idle
beside her the sceptre of a hundred tyrants. The heart of the whole
nation warmed as it had never warmed for centuries at the thought of
having in their midst a woman who cared nothing for her rights, and
nothing for those fantastic duties which are more egotistical than
rights themselves.

The work of the Queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly
underrated. She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt
invented the steam engine. William IV., from whom we think of her as
inheriting her Constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely
different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII. William IV. was
a limited monarch; that is to say, he had a definite, open, and
admitted power in politics, but it was a limited power. Queen Victoria
was not a limited monarch; in the only way in which she cared to be a
monarch at all she was as unlimited as Haroun Alraschid. She had
unlimited willing obedience, and unlimited social supremacy. To her
belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy; in which the
Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department
of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment,
was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and
purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does
not drive. Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident
completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political
supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of
the monarchy. She had her reward. For while William IV.'s supremacy may
be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen's
supremacy might be called a prophecy. By lifting a f