and literature, as any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the ’seventies and ’eighties may soon see for himself.  It is well too in these days not to forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must never recur.  But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of British kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability of King Edward VII.  He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he had essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored good will between France and Great Britain.  It is no slight upon his successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present opportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward could have handled them.

Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it must speedily undergo the profoundest modification.  The old state of affairs cannot continue.  The European dynastic system, based upon the intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas.  It is idle to close our eyes to this fact.  The revolution in Russia, the setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into world politics—­these things slam the door on any idea of working back to the old nineteenth-century system.  People calls to people.  “No peace with the Hohenzollerns” is a cry that carries with it the final repudiation of emperors and kings.  The man in the street will assure you he wants no diplomatic peace.  Beyond the unstable shapes of the present the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the common talk of men.  Kant’s lucid thought told us long ago that the peace of the world demanded a world union of republics.  That is a commonplace remark now in every civilized community.

The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic republicanism.  The question of the future of monarchy is not whether it will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of the Earth.  It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away altogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away in Russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air.