Prince Consort, however, as he did not reign, was supposed to be ambitious of governing; and his intervention in public affairs by speech or action was childishly resented.

In the five-and-thirty years which have passed since the Prince Consort spoke, a considerable change has come over public feeling; not the House of Commons, but the Monarchy is on its trial, and the Monarchy is on its trial before the House of Commons. In the debates of last Session on the Royal Grants, Mr. Gladstone alone, of that party which deems that it has a monopoly of a near and long future, spoke with any recognition of the part played by the Monarchy in the political life of England; and Mr. Gladstone, to whom, in the natural course of things, not many years of the long future of Liberal ascendency can be granted, carried with him into the Ministerial lobby only a handful of personal adherents. Polite phrases were used by Mr. Labouchere's supporters on the front Opposition bench, which, however, amounted to little more than veiled good wishes for a peaceful Euthan asia. The Monarchy is dying. Long live the Monarch. Te morituram salutamus. It is possible that that Liberal party of the future which is dreamed of, may not come to birth at all, or that the parturient Radical mountain may bring forth only a mouse. The course which will be taken by the newly enfranchised electors, who, if they are of one mind and choose to exercise the power they have, are the masters of England, is at present only a matter of speculation, of hope and fear. What an ancient writer says of war is as true of Democracy, that it seldom adheres to the rules laid down for it, but strikes out a path for itself when the time comes. But though one thing only is certain, that the future will be unlike what any one expects, though events will take their own course, and will decline to be driven and pulled aside by whips and wire-pullers, instruments surely too ignoble for Providence or even a self-respecting Destiny to employ, it does not do to be indifferent to the turn which attempts are made to give them. Still less is it safe to neglect more general tendencies, which are real and operative, though they may be counter acted by others working in a different direction. Lord Melbourne lays down the doctrine that it is not safe to despise a

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book because its author is a ridiculous fellow; Lord Melbourne's precept was necessary for his own guidance, for he was a great reader, and to him all authors were ridiculous fellows. Parodying his remark, we may say that it is not safe to neglect a revolution even though it occurs in Brazil. According to the version which first reached Europe, an Emperor who had done nothing wrong, a plant-collecting and beetle-hunting Emperor, an Emperor fond of dabbling in the smells and explosions which to some people make up experimental chemistry, a reforming and Constitution observing Emperor to boot, was suddenly told to move on and get out of this," put on board a ship, and sent across the seas. When, on Napoleon's proclamation that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign in Portugal, the Royal Family proceeded to the port of Lisbon, they were accompanied by a weeping crowd. The people of Rio Janeiro parted from their Emperor with less demonstration of emotion than they would have shown to a popular actress or musichall entertainer. He was left off like a suit of clothes which was worn out or had become unfashionable. Brazil was tired of being an Empire, and wanted to be a Republic. As the Elders of Israel suddenly discovered that they must have a king like the nations around them, so the generals and politicians of Brazil have discovered that they must have a President like the nations around them.

This sudden dying out of the monarchical sentiment, its extinction by atrophy, is the wonder of the thing. Other monarchs have been deposed because they oppressed their subjects, or resisted their will, or were centres of strife. But the Empire had kept Brazil together. The Portuguese are not a race superior to the Spanish, yet, alone of the Americans of Latin blood, their state during seventy years was free from civil war or social disorder. The Emperor was ready to do everything he was asked to do, even to going away when he was asked to go away. The fact is, I imagine, that by one of those secret transformations of feeling which go on for a long time without emerging into distinct consciousness, even in the minds of those subject to them, and then declare themselves suddenly and with a strange simultaneousness, the idea of monarchy had become in Brazil slightly

ridiculous, the Emperor had become an incongruity, and out of relations with his place and time. And, though epigrams do not kill, a general sense of the absurdity of an institution may be fatal to it without expressing itself in a single epigram. The feeling may be unreasonable, the institution may have a rational basis, but, in a conflict between feeling and fact, the fact will get the worst of it.

There are traces here and there in England of the sentiment which, politically speaking, killed the Emperor of Brazil. In the debate on the Royal Grants, a member who is popular, if popularity is to be judged of by escorting and shouting crowds, suggested that it would be desirable to terminate the engagement of the Royal Family at the death of the Queen, to declare that the throne was vacant, and that there was no intention of filling it up. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, who is sometimes witty and always jocose, has improved on the idea. Enraptured with the cashiering of an Emperor in Brazil, which he apparently looks on as Fox looked on the taking of the Bastille, as much the greatest event that ever happened in this world, he proposes that a shorter shrift shall be given to monarchy than Mr. Cony beare was willing to allow it. He is for, in future, engaging kings and enperors on the terms of a month's warning or a month's wages. He thinks it a grand idea that since the fall of the Brazilian Empire the new world, from the frozen north to the sunny south, is without a king or emperor, one hereditary grand duke or hereditary humbug of any kind." Emperors and monarchs are put up by people who have not the sense to see the uselessness of them, and children will some day ask, "What was a king, mamma?" and will be told that kings lived in the dark ages, but had disappeared. Even Mr. Gladstone, while suspending judgment on the merit of the revolution, and eulogizing the character of Dom Pedro, expresses satisfaction at the example which has been given of revolution made easy, and holds up the Brazilian short way with monarchs for approval, in comparison with the long and bloody strife of former times. Formerly anti-monarchical sentiment expressed itself in the fervent Jacobin aspiration that the last king might be strangled in the bowels of the last priest. Now it takes the mild form

of a month's wages or a month's warning.

Not merely baronetcies and Cumberland estates, but human nature itself, we may remind Sir Wilfrid Lawson in passing, are hereditary institutions. Mental qualities, habits, and capacities are transmitted; and men whose fathers have for generations followed the same pursuits are likely to be more proficient in them than those who enter from different spheres. Allowance must of course be made for exceptional cases of incapacity on the one side and capacity on the other, for the growth of new ability and the decline of old. cording to the modern theory, certain qualities become embedded in the organization and are transmitted along with it. In each man, so to speak, all his ancestors reside, and what is individual and special to him is the smallest part of the total life he bears about with him. In this sense Heine's lines are not true

"Es bleiben todt die Todten,

Ac

Und nur der Lebendiger lebt." On the contrary, the dead are more alive than the living. Moreover, the circumstances amnid which the heir to a kingdom grows up give him at least the opportunity of being acquainted with conceptions of government and policy. The talk about him may often, and must sometimes, be of these things, as the talk of graziers is of bullocks and fairs, and of grocers of sugar, and possibly of sand. Franklin used to say that an hereditary legislator was as great an absurdity as an hereditary mathematician; anybody who will look in Mr. Douglas Galton's book on hereditary genius will find that hereditary mathematicians are not absolutely unknown in history. In truth, the speculations and researches of Darwin and his predecessors and followers deprive the Franklin Lawson doctrine of the axiomatic truthfulness which was once attributed to it, and if they do not reverse it, yet very gravely qualify it.

But a view may be true without being popular, and if monarchical government ceases to appeal to the imagination and to justify itself to the common-sense of men, converts will not be made out of Darwin and Galton.

For a long time we have heard of the decline of the monarchical sentiment. Mr. Lecky, whose "History of England

in the Eighteenth Century'' is more alive with thought than any contemporary work of the same class, making it a storehouse of political reflection on which students and politicians may draw, traces this decline back to the early years of the cighteenth century. The number of disputed titles to the various European thrones, in his view, contributed much to weaken reverence for kings. Its decline forms, he says, one of the most remarkable political characteristics of the eighteenth century. The thrones of England and Spain, of Tuscany and Parma, the electoral crown of Poland and the succession to the throne of the young and, as it was thought, moribund king of France, were all disputed. Mr. Lecky assumes as a cause what is not a true cause. A disputed title to an estate does not involve or tend to produce a weakened sense of the sanctity of property. Just as little does a disputed title to a kingdom involve or tend to produce a decline of monarchical sentiment. Rather it assumes monarchy as an institution fixed and unassailable, though there may be uncertainty as to the individual monarch. The question, "Under which king ?" implies that there is no question of anybody but a king. Respect for the office is not necessarily impaired because there is doubt as to the person.

If this had been otherwise-if the stability of monarchy had depended on the stability of the thrones of individual kings -it could scarcely have existed in England. It would certainly have disappeared long before the Commonwealth. The conflict between the House of Hanover and the House of Stuart was not the first, but the last, of a long series of struggles between kings in possession and pretenders to the throne. The history of England, so far as it is a history of the kings of England, is an almost continuous record of wars of succession, in the open field or by secret conspiracy, from the Norman Conquest to the Rebellion of 1745. The conflict between William I. and Harold, between the sons of the Conqueror, between Stephen and Maud, between Henry II. and his children, between Richard and John, and John and Arthur, between Richard II. and Bolingbroke, between Henry IV. and the partisans of the Earl of March, the Wars of the Roses, setting on the throne three kings of the House of York in sequence to three kings of the

House of Lancaster, the victory of the adopted representative of John of Gaunt's line over the last of the reigning descendants of Lionel Duke of Clarence-the Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck, and Richard Wilford conspiracies of Henry VII.'s reign, involving the unhappy Earl of Warwick, son of the ill-fated Clarence,

in a common doom with two of these counterfeit princes; the real or imaginary conspiracies and the death on the scaffold of nobles of royal lineage and royal ambition, De la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and Strafford, Duke of Buckingham, and Margaret Countess of Salisbury, under Henry VIII. ; the brief mock-queendom of Lady Jane Grey, and the dangers which beset the life of the Princess Elizabeth under Queen Mary; the Norfolk and Babington conspiracies under Elizabeth; the pretensions of Philip of Spain, who claimed the throne not merely as his wife's heir, but as the descendant of John of Gaunt, the Spanish Armada being quite as much a dynastic as a religious enterprise; the more formidable pretensions of Mary Stuart-all these things show that insecurity of title, and the fact, or constantly apprehended danger, of wars of succession, run through English history, from the Battle of Hastings to the accession of the first of the Stuart kings, from the eleventh century to the seventeenth.

The intervals of undisturbed possession and peace were comparatively rare and short. The doctrine of hereditary right was very loosely held; it inferred merely a preferential title, and was subject to the most fantastic evasions. The younger sons of William I. succeeded, in disregard of the claims of their elder brother. Henry I., indeed, affected to base his claims to the throne on the fact that, though not the eldest son of the Duke of Normandy, he was the eldest son of the king of England, being alone born after William I.'s accession. John's title was in derogation of the claim of the son of his elder brother. Henry VIII., with the authorization of his Parliament, made a testamentary disposition of the Crown, entailing it, as if it had been a landed estate, after his son, upon his two daughters, both of whom could not be legitimate. Edward VI. attempted by his "plan" to set aside this settlement in favor of Lady Jane Grey, on the ground of the bastardy of both his sisters.~ Under Eliza

beth, an Act of Parliament made guilty of treason any one who should declare any particular person, other than the natural issue of the Queen's body, to be entitled to the throne. The hereditary title, on the Queen's death without children, was in the House of Suffolk, the descendants of Henry VIII.'s elder daughter, and, on grounds of policy, they were set aside for the Stuart family. An hereditary title to the throne is firmly established now, by Act of Parliament, in the descendants of the Electress Sophia; but the principle in its strongest form dates from the eighteenth century, in which it is strangely said to have been impaired. There seems to be little ground for contending that in England the monarch was ever held to rule by divine right, at least by any other divine light than that which sees the benediction of Heaven in actual possession: beati possidentes. It was not much heard of till the accession of James-I., and was used by him to supplement a notorious defect of hereditary title, which he was unwilling to strengthen by an acknowledgment that he owed his throne to election by the nation. The fact is that James I. was King of England by a kind of adoption, not altogether dissimilar to that which prevailed under the Roman Empire, and with the working of which M. Renan is so well pleased that he would like to see it introduced into the public law of modern Europe. The extreme doctrine of divine right which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Richard II. is an anachronism. It belongs not to the fourteenth century, but in germ perhaps to the closing years of the sixteenth and the commencement of the seventeenth, to the Tudors and Stuarts; and not to the Plantagenets. In the words:

"Not all the water in the wide rough

sea,

Can wash the balm from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord

it is noticeable that it is not the hereditary title, but election by the Lord, the consecrating balm and not primogeniture and rule of birth, on which an inalienable right is based. So in Hamlet, the usurper and murderer, Claudius avows himself safe in the shelter of that divinity which doth so hedge a king that treason can but peep to what it will. A subject and courtier of Elizabeth and of James I. could not iden

tify divine right with hereditary title, in which they were lacking. Elizabeth, indeed, 'during the Essex rebellion, is said to have detected incentives to sedition in the story of Bolingbroke's adventure, and to have exclaimed, "" Know ye not that I am Richard II. ?" But if we are to suppose that Shakespeare was writing as a politi cian and not as a poet, it must be kept in mind that his politics, if they were not, as is sometimes contended, those of the House of Lancaster, were certainly in succession those of the Houses of Tudor and Stuart, whose title was through the House of Lancaster. Till near the close of the fourteenth century of our history, the doctrine that the king never dies, expressed in the formula of the French monarchy, "The king is dead; long live the king,' did not prevail. The reign of the new monarch was supposed to begin, not on the day of what is now called his accession, but on the day of his coronation ; the interval between the two was often a lawless anarchy, and the king's peace died with him. The inconvenience which this state of things produced when any considerable interval elapsed between the death of the king and his coronation made it necessary to adopt the system which recognizes no interregnum. But the older usage shows that the divine right of the king, so far as it existed, was in the office, and not in the person; that it was conferred, not by hereditary title, but by popular election and divine sanction, by the acclamations of the people, whose voice was, in his case at least, recognized as the voice of God, by coronation and the consecrating balm. It was the anointed king, the deputy elected of the Lord, who ruled, and not the inheritor by rule of birth, though the two qualifications usually cohered in the same person.

If, therefore, the monarchical sentiment in England is impaired, its enfeeblement cannot be attributed to the decay of ideas which never had any hold of the national mind. The superstition of divine right and of an absolutely indefeasible hereditary title was never a popular superstition. It was a kingly belief in the mind of James I., a bookish theory with Sir Robert Filmer and Sir George Mackenzie, surviving from the Stuart period to that of the House of Hanover in "Old Shippen," and in the eccentric and learned John Reeves. It was a royal dream, a clerical dcgma, a

university thesis, an antiquarian crotchet, a legal pedantry, a branch of political speculation; but it was never the belief of the English nation. It sprang first, as I have before said, out of James I.'s desire to find another than a popular title to his throne, and was strengthened by reaction from the Parliamentary triumph over Charles I., from the Protectorate, from the Exclusion Bill, and from the Declaration of Rights and the Act of Settlement. The theories of De Maistre and Bonald had the same counter-revolutionary origin in France. In England the doctrine has seldom been more than militant, an affair of the closet and pulpit, of the university cloister or the lawyer's chamber, at most of the political pamphleteer and the Opposition leader. The royalist superstition has disappeared, but not necessarily with it the monarchical sentiment.

Some change has, however, come over it even within the present generation, or during a yet shorter period, as any one may convince himself who will turn over the pages of the late Mr. Bagehot's book on The English Constitution." When that little volume appeared, now about twenty years ago, it was received by many persons as a sort of revelation of the real nature of the institutions under which we live. Other writers had been detained in the outskirts of the temple; he had penetrated to its inmost shrine, and drawn thence the life of the building. They had been engaged in the forms; he had reached the substance. They had entangled themselves in the mechanism; he had laid bare the very pulse of the machine. "The secret of Mr. Bagehot" was this: that the English monarchy, in the character which it had assumed during the present reign, was a disguise for hiding the real elective character of the English Constitution. The House of Commons was, of course, openly elected by the constituencies. Ministers were nominally appointed by the Crown, but they were really chosen by Parliament. The statesman who possessed in a higher degree than any other the confidence of the party which had a majority in the House of Commons was practically elected by that party to the Premiership that is, to the real, though temporary, chieftainship of the State-as certainly though not so formally as the President of the Federal Council in Switzerland (who is not, as he is commonly called, President

of the Swiss Republic) is chosen for his yearly term by the Federal Assembly. The elected head of the State, the Prime Minister, chooses his colleagues, who are roughly designated for him by the position they have attained in the House of Commons. The Queen's business in the matter, allowing a certain margin for those personal accommodations, that reciprocal give and take, without which neither life in general, nor that particular. branch of life called government, can be carried on, was simply that of graceful acquiescence.

In the main this may be a true account of the matter, though it had not even, when Mr. Bagehot wrote, quite the novelty which he and his critics fancied. Lord Macaulay and many lesser writers had said it all before. What Mr. Bagehot did was to restate what were then, and had long been, the commonplaces of constitutional doctrine with a freshness and keenness of style and a copiousness of piquant illustration which gave them the aspect of discoveries, almost of revelations. His art was akin to that of the careful housewife in Burns's poem, whose skill gar'd the old clothes look almost as good as new. Rather he dressed the old truth in new clothes, and the tailor got the credit of having made the man. But the truth was not to be disclosed beyond the sacred but limited circle of the initiated who read Mr. Bagehot's essays as they originally appeared in the Fortnightly Review, or in the volume in which they were afterward collected. According to Mr. Bagehot, the poorest and most ignorant classes in his time really believed that the Queen governed. separation of principal power from principal station is a refinement, he says, beyond their power of-conception. They fancy they are governed by an hereditary Queen, a Queen by the grace of God, when they are really governed by a Cabinet and a Parliament, men like themselves, chosen by themselves." I doubt whether, even in the politically distant period at which and of which Mr. Bagehot wrote, this description was true. The poorest and most ignorant classes, strictly speaking, probably never troubled themselves as to how they were governed at all. Their speculations and imagination did not travel beyond their experience, which was restricted to the policeman at the street corner and the magistrate at petty or quarter sessions. The needy knife-grinder represents their

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The