No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriages would gradually merge that family into the general body of the British peerage.  Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an associated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardly more functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer.  Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view.

It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in the royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the British king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican institutions.  A thing that is productive of an enormous amount of republican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion—­I believe an ill-founded suspicion—­that there are influences at work at court antagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and that there is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberal allies to dynastic sympathies.  These things are not to be believed, but it would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something like a royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship.  The behaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan statesman Venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly Greek republicans in favour of the manifestly treacherous King of Greece, has produced the deepest shame and disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are even warmly “loyal” to the British monarchy.

And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that the British habit of asylum should be abused.  We have already in England the dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after.  In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings.  We do not want Great Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples.  This is particularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser’s death—­which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for many years—­the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering.  We do not want any German ex-monarchs; Sweden is always open to them and friendly, and to Sweden they ought to go; and particularly do British people dread an irruption of Hohenzollerns or Coburgers.  Almost as undesirable would be the arrival of the Czar and Czarina.  It is supremely important that no wind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of Russia.  After the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious to sow discord between the great Russian-speaking and English-speaking democracies.  Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant domesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czarina in England with frequent and easy