"The loss of my dear, great friend … has completely overwhelmed me. His devotion and kindness to me, his wise counsels, his great gentleness combined with firmness, his one thought for the honor and glory of the country, and his unswerving loyalty to the throne, make the death of my dear Lord Beaconsfield a national calamity. My grief is great and lasting."
The Queen's words, "his one thought for the honor and glory of the country," are illustrative of what Her Majesty most values in her counsellors; they also indicate her conception of Royalty as a means of representing the nation, and the fusion of party differences. With the wider and wider extension of the suffrage, the House of Commons stands in danger, by its very representative character, of representing only the people who vote for it, and these are only a handful in the great world of the British Empire. The Queen has 378,000,000 subjects; of these only about six millions vote for the Members of the House of Commons. There is danger of the six millions acting with something less than justice to the unrepresented 372,000,000. The Queen constantly watches against this danger, and her well-trained eye quickly detects those among the statesmen of both parties who are able to grasp the larger conception of the duties of government, who are not prepared to destroy the Empire to buy a party majority, or who steadily decline to buy, for example, thirty seats in Lancashire, by the sacrifice of Indian fiscal interests. To such men she gives her support and encouragement, and she has consequently been, throughout her long reign, a steady influence with both parties on the side of prefering national to party ends.
That she has achieved much in this direction is undoubted, and it is also undoubted that she has achieved it mainly by the absolute sincerity of her own character, and by its spontaneous power of distinguishing between the false and the true, the noble
