This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilities of locomotion as the Mauretania followed from the discoveries of steam and steel.

OF THE NEW REIGN

(June, 1911.)

The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets.  Already the vast army of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created set themselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that converges upon Central London will be choked again with great loads of timber—­but this time going outward—­as our capital emerges from this unprecedented inundation of loyalty.  The most elaborately conceived, the most stately of all recorded British Coronations is past.

What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does this tremendous ceremony inaugurate?  The question is inevitable.  There is nothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as the crowning of a king.  It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises.  This is a new beginning-place for histories.

To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in the hierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter uniforms, whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watch the dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of critical expectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediately concerned in the spectacle.  They have had their parts to play, their symbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, and we have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity was assured.  I can conceive many of them, a little fatigued, preparing now for social dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing the detail of these events with an air of things accomplished.  They will decide whether the Coronation has been a success and whether everything has or has not passed off very well.  For us in the great crowd nothing has as yet succeeded or passed off well or ill.  We are intent upon a King newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom we know as yet very little, but who has, nevertheless, roused such expectation as no King before him has done since Tudor times, in the presence of gigantic opportunities.

There is a conviction widespread among us—­his own words, perhaps, have done most to create it—­that King George is inspired, as no recent predecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that his is to be no role of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad processes of our national and imperial development.  That greater public life which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told, taken hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity and correlation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents, but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.