The lengthening experience of the Queen, laid up in a most retentive ...

The lengthening experience of the Queen, laid up in a most retentive and faithful memory, was

making her an excellent person to talk

things over with; if she had mastered the nervous horror of London which drove her to Balmoral and Osborne, and had kept her Ministers under the charm at Buckingham Palace, her influence would have grown with her experience; if she had been a woman on the intellectual level of her Consort, her influence might have become very great. On three occasions after the Prince's death she intervened with decisive

effect: in checking the hysterical fussiness

with which Palmerston and Russell were behaving over Schleswig-Holstein under the grim contemptuous eyes of Bismarck; in promoting the passage of the Reform Bill of 1867; in releasing the deadlock of the Houses over Reform and Redistribution in 1884. But Disraeli made her a partisan: the hoarded experience which might have been freely at the disposal of all her Ministers was reserved for such favorites as Salisbury and Rosebery, and the influence was dissipated in reprimands and injunctions, often shrewd, always vigorous, but sometimes petulant and sometimes petty.

But on the people the figure of the Queen was growing in power and fascination. Her Conservatism did her no harm with a nation which was beginning to think, and dream, and shout imperially, and which, politically, was outgrowing certain of the limitations of its fathers.

Early Victorian England, with some of the defects, had the one great merit at least of oligarchic government: a clear and rational political philosophy. Certain men, whose rank and wealth gives them influence and standing, are appointed by the respectable classes to consult for the people, to the end that they may be well ordered.

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