Whether elements so disparate would fall apart by mutual consent, or reunite ...

Whether elements so disparate would fall apart by mutual consent, or reunite in a new order; of what shape or nature that order would be-a Customs Union or Union for Defense, with representation at Westminster or without-such topics might be debated in peace, but who could say what answer the strain of war might give? The Empire stood in such a precarious equipoise of parts that only some inner cohesion of feeling or purpose could create a habit of unity, and the one thing common to all subjects of the Queen was that they always had been subjects of the Queen.

Her reign stretched out of memory, giving to the youngest of democracies its share in a majestic and immemorial tradition.

When we think of all the forces, all the causes, at work in the sixty-three years of her reign; with how few of them she was in sympathy, how few she understood; we must find it ironically strange that Victoria should, by the accident of a youthful accession and a long reign, have been chosen to give her name to an age, to impose an illusory show of continuity and uniformity on a tract of time where men and manners, science and philosophy, the fabric of social life and its directing ideas, changed more swiftly perhaps, and more profoundly, than they have ever changed in an age not sundered by a political or a religious upheaval. If the Queen, and not Prince Albert, had died in 1861, we might have set against each other

the Victorian and Edwardian

ages, and seen in the contrast the most striking example in our history of pacific, creative, unsubversive revolution.

But upon the English race Fate had imposed the further, ecumenical function of Empire and for all time that we can foresee, great nations in all Continents will look back, for the origins of their polity, and their institutions, to the years when they were first united in freedom, or the hope of freedom, under the sceptre of Victoria. There are in our nineteenth-century history certain moments of concentrated emotion which seem to gather up the purposes

of a whole generation.

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