LORD SALISBURY'S EULOGY Tributes to Queen Victoria 217 Before leaving the subject of the change in the English sovereignty it is fitting to note some of the world-wide tributes to the memory of Queen Victoria. During her last days messages of sympathy came to Osborne House from all civilized countries. The impression that her character had made on affairs was so marked that even in countries which had small friendliness toward the English there were many who felt in her death an almost unaccountable sense of personal loss. Many years before, the Laureate, Tennyson, had written: "Her court was pure; her life serene; God gave her peace; her land reposed; A thousand claims to reverence closed And it was this reverence, mingled with affection, that expressed itself through grief when she died. The English law requires that Parliament shall assemble immediately after the death of the sovereign; so both Houses met on the day following the Queen's death. The first two days of the brief session were taken up with the swearing of allegiance to the King, but on January 25 the Houses proceeded to record their sense of the nation's loss. Suitable resolutions were adopted. Of great interest were the speeches of the leaders. In the House of Lords, the Premier, Lord Salisbury, in moving an address, said: "We owe her gratitude in every direction-for her influence in elevating the people, for her power with foreign courts. and sovereigns to remove difficulties and misapprehension which sometimes might have been dangerous; but, above all things, I think, we owe her gratitude for this, that by a happy dispensation her reign has coincided with that great change which has come over the political structure of this country and the political instincts of its people. She has bridged over that great interval which separates old England from new England. Other nations may have had to pass through similar trials, but have seldom passed through them so peaceably, so easily, and with so much prosperity and success as we have. I think that future historians will look to the Queen's reign as the boundary which separates the two states of England-England which has changed so much -and recognize that we have undergone the change with constant in crease of public prosperity, without any friction to endanger the peace or stability of our civil life, and at the same time with a constant expansion of an empire which every year grows more and more powerful. We owe all these blessings to the tact, the wisdom, the passionate patriotism, and the incomparable judgment of the Sovereign whom we deplore." The aged Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking with much emotion, said: "Her influence, the character of her court, the character of the domestic life, of which her subjects were allowed to know something, had a penetrating power which reached far beyond the possibility of our being able to trace it. There can be no question that all society has been the better because the Queen has reigned. There cannot be a question that it has been a blessing to very, very many who know not from whence the blessing flowed. . . . She was a religious woman. She was a good woman. She set up a true standard of such lives as Christians ought to live." In the House of Commons Mr. Balfour spoke of the Queen's vital relation to the Government. "In my judgment," he said, "the importance of the Crown in our Constitution is not a diminishing but an increasing factor. It is increasing, and must increase, with the growth and development of those free, self-governing communities, those new commonwealths beyond the sea, who are bound to us by the person of the sovereign, who is the living symbol of the unity of the empire. But it is not given, it cannot, in ordinary course, be given, to a constitutional monarch to signalize his reign by any great isolated action. The effect of a constitutional sovereign, great as it is, is produced by the slow, constant, and cumulative results of a great ideal and a great example; and of that great ideal and that great example Queen Victoria surely was the first of all constitutional monarchs whom the world has yet seen." Such tributes as these, spoken not only in Parliament, but in churches, on the public forums, everywhere among Englishmen who were able to express what they felt, and also by the people of other nations, were not the mere disproportionate utterances of grief. They were the sincere recognition of truths which had been visible through so long a reign that they could not be mistaken. At a meeting on January 30, Lord Rosebery defined the nation's |