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has strayed from the straight and narrow path wherein alone monarchs nowadays can find success. But it is not impossible that from the lofty eminence of the throne King Edward may not have realized the extent to which this perfect loyalty of the Sovereign to the Constitutional tradition has been obscured, to the no small detriment of the throne, by injudicious courtiers in the press at home, and by ill-informed commentators in the press abroad. the result of their combined, although not antagonistic, activity, the fair image of an ideal Constitutional king actually presented by the King to the world is being obscured and defaced by a kind of Brocken spectre, projected on the misty cloudland of popular ignorance. His Majesty is shown by the phantasmagoria of the press as the master of his Ministers, the director of the foreign policy of his Empire, a monarch who, by the transcendent force of his statesmanship, now governs the nation over which his predecessors were content to reign.

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It may be objected that so strange a misrepresentation of the actual facts cannot possibly deceive any intelligent person in the three Kingdoms. tunately, in our country there are many persons not intelligent, a fact which Carlyle stated with more emphasis. Constant iteration in journals of vast circulation cannot fail to produce some impression upon readers, many of whom still cherish the relics of the Stuarts. At the same time, if the matter only concerned our own country, and the mass of the English people, these remarks would never have been penned. Mr. Gladstone's emphatic words would justify passing over such effusions with contempt. He wrote in 1878:

There can be in England no disloyalty more gross as to its effects than the superstition which affects to assign to the sovereign a separate, and,

SO far as separate, transcendental sphere of political action. Anonymous servility has indeed in these last days hinted such a doctrine, but it is no more practicable to make it thrive in England than to rear the jungles of Bengal on Salisbury Plain. (Gleanings, vol. I., page 230.)

But anonymous servility has become blatant in these still later days, and it has produced its inevitable consequences in the creation of dangerous misconceptions and mischievous misunderstandings abroad. This is inevitable. For the British Constitution

is commonly seen, by even the most intelligent of foreigners, as pictures are seen in gaslight, with a strong projection of their more glaring colors, and a total, or at best very serious, loss of their more delicate, cool, transparent shadows and graduating touches. (Ib., p. 26.)

Hence, while at home it is perfectly, understood by the intelligent that the English Sovereign is, and will always be, a strictly Constitutional monarch, the opinion is almost universal among Continental politicians that it is King "Edouard," and not the Cabinet, who is the decisive factor in framing the foreign policy of Great Britain.

However absurd this delusion may appear to educated Englishmen, its prevalence has done much mischief in the past. It may do more mischief in the future. Incidentally it tends to circumscribe more narrowly than ever the range of action within which our King can give effect to his personal feelings. If His Majesty is regarded as the arbiter of Britain's destinies, the masterdirector of Britain's foreign policy, it follows as an inevitable consequence that he must no longer permit himself to indulge in likes and dislikes, or even to take part in those family differences which have such a strange fascination for mortal crowned.

men, crowned or un

The writer may be pardoned for referring to one lamentable consequence which has followed from the mistaken belief on the Continent that His Majesty rules as well as reigns in England. The incident belongs to past history, and the only sentiment which its recital will evoke will be one of gratitude that that period of irritation has given place to a happier era of goodwill. Nor shall I presume so far into the coulisses of Courts as to venture upon any indiscreet details.

King Edward VII. has now reigned seven years. During three of those years it is notorious that he entertained feelings not too affectionate towards his Imperial nephew at Berlin. Far be it from me to attempt to apportion the responsibility for the misunderstanding which prevailed between these exalted personages. Suffice it to say that for personal and family reasons, which were utterly apart from the interests of Britain or of Germany, the uncle was not on cordial terms with his nephew, and the nephew was equally, not at daggers-drawn, but at pin-pricks with his uncle. It would be absurd to attempt to deny to any Sovereign, merely because he is a Sovereign, the human feelings which appeal so irresistibly to our nature. But as the immediate result of the existence of these personal and family estrangements between uncle and nephew was to set up more or less strained relations between 60 millions of Germans and all the subjects of the British Empire, the most humble and loyal of Englishmen may venture to express a regret that these personal matters could not be treated as mere private affairs. As the result of these purely private irritations, some hundred millions of men spent anxious days and waking nights merely because an uncle and nephew, who happened for the time not to get on together, occupied the thrones of their respective coun

tries. In olden days a scurrilous jest by one monarch concerning the mistress of another plunged Europe into a bloody war. Surely the moral is inevitable. The tranquillity of realms should not be compromised by the personal differences of their monarchs. It must either be distinctly understood that they are incapable of influencing the policy of their States by their personal likings or dislikings, or they must be absolutely prohibited from experiencing the most universal of human feelings which border on uncharitable

ness.

The King and the Kaiser, as was publicly displayed last month at Cronberg, are now on the most friendly terms, and we devoutly hope that the pact of family love may never be disturbed even by a lovers' quarrel. But the poison engendered in the minds of their respective subjects continues to work. The popular German idea is that King Edward entertained a hostile animus to his nephew which inspired every act of British foreign policy. If they had rightly understood, what his subjects know, that the course of British foreign policy is no more influenced by His Majesty's personal feelings or family differences than the rising of the Nile is affected by the monuments of antagonistic dynasties that adorn its banks, Germans might have judged English policy upon its merits. But as they misunderstood this fundamental fact, they naturally found the secret of every act of British statecraft in His Majesty's Imagined determination not to be outdone by his nephew.

Hence there has arisen in the German mind one of the most fantastic and preposterous myths that ever demonstrated at once the creative powers of the popular imagination and the dimensions of the gullet of popular credulity. It is a popular impression in Germany that Edward VII. is not

merely the Richelieu of the twentieth century, but that he is constantly preoccupied in weaving plans of Machiavellian deviltry for the purpose of weakening, injuring and, above all, of isolating the nation which owes allegiance to his nephew. What is believed to be the fact has often more influence in politics than the fact itself; and the real King of England is of less importance to the peace and tranquillity of Europe than is the imaginary Edward VII. as he is pictured daily in the German press, a sinister figure dominating the European situation, who spends his days and nights in spinning, like some infernal spider, the meshes of the net in which Germany is being encircled. His Majesty is not a prince with the intellect of a Richelieu. He possesses neither the overmastering brain, nor the dominating will, nor the calculating ambition of the great Cardinal. He aspires as little to possess the conscience or the ethics of Machiavelli as to inherit the ant-like industry of his illustrious father. His genius does not lie in politics. He is an inveterate traveller, and much enjoys change of place and scene. He retained after his Coronation the genial, pleasure-loving disposition of the Prince of Wales, and used it with sense and tact to aid the policy of his Foreign Secretaries. But these things, which are matters of common knowledge to us in England, are unknown to the believers in the myth of modern Germany concerning the Bismarckian genius and dogged diplomacy of "Onkel Edouard."

This myth continues to exert a mischievous influence upon contemporary politics. When His Majesty, in fulfilment of the plainest of his duties, alike as a Sovereign and a man, undertook to visit the Emperor of Russia, this visit of courtesy and congratulation was the occasion of an outburst of comments in many German papers, which suggested the need for writing this article.

It was openly asserted or cunningly suggested that His Majesty's sole object in visiting his relative in Russia was the welding of a ring of hostile allances around Germany. It was seriously argued by journalists, at present outside lunatic asylums, that His Majesty was going to Reval in order to conclude a triple alliance, binding England, France and Russia to make war on the Germans by land and sea. It was even asserted that His Majesty was prepared to purchase the Russian alliance by making over to the Tsar the reversion to Constantinople and the Asiatic possessions of the Sick Man. To give substance to these alarms, they printed a garbled version of the ordinary parade-ground oratory of the Kaiser, as if it were a challenge to all to come on, and a reply to the attempt to einkreisen Germany. A sombre and sinister, but sonorous, throb of the war drum vibrated through the Fatherland. As if from sheer schadenfreude, some English journalists eagerly seized the occasion to confirm and intensify the uneasy feeling of their German colleagues. The Throne and the Country-a journal probably unknown to the throne and but little seen in the country-after declaring that the visit involved questions of high policy, proceeded to say:

No one has done more than the King towards the solidification of England's interests on the Continent; and this last act may justly be regarded as the coping stone of the splendid structure of diplomacy which has been the means of curbing effectually the soaring ambition of Germany by securing the friendly attitude of the two Powers which flank her on either side.

It would be ill-advised to ignore as beneath contempt such a revelation of the extent to which the popular delusions as to His Majesty's efforts to control British policy and of the antiGerman motive of his every action

have cankered the mind of Germans and to a certain extent bemused the brain of the Germanophobes at home. It is a symptom of the deep-seated malady which afflicts Europe, whose seriousness our King, of all men, is best able to diagnose.

What is that malady? What causes the Germans every now and then to burst out into what Prince von Bülow called recently "the defiant instinct of self-preservation"? Why is it that the Germans are perpetually discussing the possibility of the necessity for striking down this, that or the other Power whose ambitions seem to menace them? It is not that the Germans are unethical. That they appear to be so is due to the fact that their ethics are those not of the position which they actually occupy, but those of the position which they think they occupy. When two men are swimming for their lives in deep waters, the most austere moralist would perhaps not severely blame a man for choking his own brother in order to release the grip which would have cost his own life. The "defiant instinct of self-preservation" found free and full expression when Frederic the Great was building up the Prussian kingdom. It found hardly less defiant expression when Bismarck was building up the German Empire. The recently published Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe reminded Europe rather painfully of the absence of any controlling principle save that of the "defiant instinct of self-preservation" in the state-craft of the Iron Chancellor. Such a non-moral conception of public right and of international law is inevitable when nations are, or think they are, in what may be called the struggle for life - in - deep-water stage. What Germans need to discover is that they have now well emerged from that stage. The alarms and dreads in which many Germans pass their lives are an atavistic sur

vival from an outgrown past. But so long as men imagine they are still living in the peril of their lives in which their ancestors passed their existence, they will relapse into the manners and morals of those ancestors. Carry the alarms a little further back, and cannibalism could be justified by the "defiant instinct of preservation" as conclusively as many of the policies eagerly recommended by some more or less crazy journalists in Germany and England.

All the unrest of Europe arises from fear. Perfect love casteth out fear, for fear hath torment. It is not less true that fear casts out not only love, perfect or imperfect, but in its torment banishes peace, and insists upon the negation of all moral principle in the relations of nations. Hence, to secure the peace of Europe, the supreme object should be to cast out fear, to reassure the timorous, to encourage belief in the strength of the national position. King Edward VII. has recognized and acted upon this truism in the case of many nations. But, most unfortunately, the one nation of all others which is most morbidly fearful of an attack on two fronts has, by some foolish English journalists and statesmen, been treated otherwise. There bas been some appearance of a design to isolate Germany, to expose her helpless to a coalition of adverse Powers, and so it has come to pass that our King has been, and is, regarded in Germany as the master spirit of the deadly competition.

It may with reason be retorted that the King is not responsible for the morbid imaginings of his more harebrained subjects. But during some of the seven years of his reign there has, perhaps, not been a sufficient effort on his part to allay the alarms of the Germans. While preserving an attitude of scrupulous correctitude in his relations to other nations, it is difficult to

suppress a feeling that he may have secretly enjoyed the consciousness that the Germans were quite unnecessarily agitating themselves about his action. Such a course of conduct, while natural enough, is too dangerous to be indulged in by a sovereign. An ingenious novelist, regardless of Weismann, has written a romance suggested by the theory that the horrible sensation of falling through space, so familiar in nightmare, is a revival of the memories of adventures experienced by our arboreal ancestors. The Germans are haunted by the constant revival of memories of a much less distant past. Most of the utterances which give so much offence and do so much to embitter the relations between the two nations are wrung from our German cousins while suffering from that kind of nightmare. I venture to submit that it would be a task worthy of the most exalted position to discourage the engendering of nightmares and to avoid actions which are likely to give the Germans an attack of the fidgets.

By the laborious efforts of a group of publicists, the English Sovereign has been elevated to the position of Hobgoblin-in-Ordinary to the German people. If German mothers do not frighten their children to sleep by the name of "Onkel Edouard," no monarch is more constantly employed as a Bugaboo in many German newspapers. What I venture humbly to suggest is that the King, bearing that fact in mind, should scrupulously refrain from any action which might give excuse for the Hobgoblin theory or increase the effectiveness of a Bugaboo, whose chief use is to scare the German taxpayer into voting money for the navy. I will give an instance.

Than the visit to Reval nothing could be more fitting, nothing could be less fraught with offence to Germany. But its sudden announcement scared the alarmist press of Germany as if it were

a bolt from the blue. If it had been preceded or even accompanied by explanations from the Sovereign and from his Ministers, carefully framed so as to disarm the suspicious and reassure the timorous, Europe might have been spared a good deal of uneasiness. Even after the visit was announced no pains seem to have been taken to allay German anxiety. On the contrary, much was done which had the effect of intensifying it. The central source of the alarm of the Germans springs from their belief that King Edward, of whose almost supernatural ability in political manoeuvres they have fully persuaded themselves, is his own Foreign Minister, pursuing with relentless persistence a personal policy aiming at the isolation and ultimately at the destruction of Germany. The one great check upon this fantastic theory is the assertion of the Constitutional doctrine that His Majesty neither has, nor can have, nor desires to have, any foreign policy excepting that for which the English Cabinet and the Foreign Minister are responsible. As if to weaken the salutary influence of this consideration, the King was allowed to proceed to Reval unaccompanied by any Minister of State. The Tsar was attended by M. Izvolsky and M. Stolypin. King Edward was unattended by a single responsible Minister.

I am aware that for this apparently deliberate but obviously inadvertent confirmation of the German belief in a malevolent, Machiavellian personal policy on the part of the King, the blame must constitutionally be laid at the doors of the Secretary of State or of the Cabinet. I am not concerned with the author of the blunder. But it is to be regretted that Sir Edward Grey's attention was not aroused to a sense of his duty in this matter. The reason probably is that it was wished to minimize the political significance of the Reval visit, at which no business was