A principal reason why the Monarchy so well consecrates our whole state is to be sought in the peculiarity many Americans and many utilitarians smile at.  They laugh at this “extra,” as the Yankee called it, at the solitary transcendent element.  They quote Napoleon’s saying, “that he did not wish to be fatted in idleness,” when he refused to be grand elector in Sieyes’ Constitution, which was an office copied, and M. Thiers says, well copied, from constitutional monarchy.  But such objections are wholly wrong.  No doubt it was absurd enough in the Abbe Sieyes to propose that a new institution, inheriting no reverence, and made holy by no religion, should be created to fill the sort of post occupied by a constitutional king in nations of monarchical history.  Such an institution, far from being so august as to spread reverence around it, is too novel and artificial to get reverence for itself; if, too, the absurdity could anyhow be augmented, it was so by offering an office of inactive uselessness and pretended sanctity to Napoleon, the most active man in France, with the greatest genius for business, only not sacred, and exclusively fit for action.  But the blunder of Sieyes brings the excellence of real monarchy to the best light.  When a monarch can bless, it is best that he should not be touched.  It should be evident that he does no wrong.  He should not be brought too closely to real measurement.  He should be aloof and solitary.  As the functions of English royalty are for the most part latent, it fulfils this condition.  It seems to order, but it never seems to struggle.  It is commonly hidden like a mystery, and sometimes paraded like a pageant, but in neither case is it contentious.  The nation is divided into parties, but the crown is of no party.  Its apparent separation from business is that which removes it both from enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine the affection of conflicting parties—­to be a visible symbol of unity to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.

Thirdly.  The Queen is the head of our society.  If she did not exist the Prime Minister would be the first person in the country.  He and his wife would have to receive foreign ministers, and occasionally foreign princes, to give the first parties in the country; he and she would be at the head of the pageant of life; they would represent England in the eyes of foreign nations; they would represent the Government of England in the eyes of the English.

It is very easy to imagine a world in which this change would not be a great evil.  In a country where people did not care for the outward show of life, where the genius of the people was untheatrical, and they exclusively regarded the substance of things, this matter would be trifling.  Whether Lord and Lady Derby received the foreign ministers, or Lord and Lady Palmerston, would be a matter of indifference; whether they gave the nicest parties would be important only to the persons at those parties.  A nation of unimpressible philosophers would not care at all how the externals of life were managed.  Who is the showman is not material unless you care about the show.