Sir Herbert Maxwell

“ Reviewing the Jubilee celebrations as a whole it is impossible not to be struck by the leading characteristic of them all—their complete success. The Sovereign Lady in whose honour everything was done, was delighted with all; her subjects throughout the Empire enjoyed themselves hugely; not a single accident dimmed the happiness of Jubilee Day in London; the Procession was the most splendid ever witnessed; the Review at Spithead transcended in magnificence anything of the kind recorded in the annals of our navy; and the Review at Aldershot was a triumph for our brave little army. ”

“ It is the second and third generation from that time which now cries “God save the Queen! Long live Victoria!” Never before in the history of our nation has it fallen to the lot of any historian to tell the story of such a long reign, to chronicle such unbroken national progress, to trace such a series of peaceful changes, to record such accumulation of wealth and diffusion of comfort in a like period.
Sixty years ago! The population of these islands was then some twenty-five millions; it amounts now to upwards of thirty-eight millions. ”

“ We are not, and probably never shall be, a nation of students, but we have become within the limits of the present reign a nation of readers. The press of the country is free—free in a sense that has never been tolerated in any other State. Public men and measures are submitted to searching criticism in a degree that would be wholly intolerable but for the general high tone maintained in British journalism. There are few things more remarkable in our civilisation than the abundance of excellent writing supplied to the daily and weekly press, and the sound morality which pervades it. ”

“ An early riser at all times, it was his custom, summer and winter, to dispose of a couple of hours’ work before breakfast, and it is no figure of speech to say that few of the Queen’s subjects can have been more constantly or more laboriously employed than her husband. The Prince had lived down any popular prejudice which he had to encounter in the early years of his married life; people had come to understand and appreciate his abilities and disposition, and the time had come when his genius and industry were to bear remarkable fruit. ”

“ And you began to understand, as never before, what the Empire amounts to. Not only that we possess all these remote outlandish places, and can bring men from every end of the earth to join us in honouring our Queen, but also that all these people are working, not simply under us, but with us that we send out a boy here and a boy there, and the boy takes hold of the savages of the part he comes to, and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to obey him and believe in him, and die for him and the Queen. ”

“ In the first place, it is absolutely free: there is nothing approaching a censorship of the Press, and in those rare instances in which, during the present reign, publishers have been interfered with by the State, as has occasionally happened in Ireland, the offence has not been a political one, but such incitement to crime or disorder as would be punishable in any private individual. It is matter for just pride that this liberty is exceedingly seldom abused. Another point of difference is that the British Government has no official or semi-official organ in the press. ”

“ There are still to be witnessed in the Queen’s realm those violent contrasts between vast wealth and grinding poverty, which must ever arise in every civilised State in periods of great commercial and productive activity. They are a standing perplexity and distress to philanthropists; but one of the brightest features in the reign of Queen Victoria, of infinitely deeper significance than the accumulation of riches by the nation and by individuals, is the degree to which that wealth has penetrated the middle and industrial classes. ”

“ The troops which followed represented almost every branch of the regular army and made a splendid show. But here, as in the Jubilee Procession itself, the Colonial contingent attracted the greatest share of attention. To see gallant horsemen and steady marching infantry in picturesque unfamiliar uniforms from every Continent all following the same flag and serving the same Queen was to receive a new and inspiring impression of the Empire. ”

“ In bringing to a close this brief survey of the reign of twelve lustres—the longest reign in the history of Great Britain—we may note with gratitude that not one of the many influences that have contributed to the moral or material well-being of the subjects of the empire shows any sign of abating in force. It is a task of no little difficulty and complexity to reconcile the rival, and sometimes conflicting, interests arising in a vast population, and, at the same time, to maintain our lead in the competitive industry of nations ”

“ In one respect the reign of Queen Victoria offers a strange and rather melancholy contrast to all that have preceded it, inasmuch as it is the first during which the architects of this country have been totally destitute of any peculiar style of building. |Victorian Architecture.| Never were builders more ingenious or more skilful, never was there such vast expenditure in the erection of private or public buildings, but never before were architects so completely reliant on the past for design. ”

“ Not only was Prince Albert remarkably handsome and amiable, but he had sedulously cultivated natural gifts of a very high order. He had made himself a good musician, he had penetrated far in natural science, made a special study of social politics, and was well read in general literature. He was known to have steered a clear course among the temptations which peculiarly beset a young man of princely rank and fortune. All this he might have been, and yet, had there not been something to balance it, he might have proved no fitting consort of the young Queen of the English. ”

“ Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, no ineffective safety valves in times of discontent, were tolerated in the United Kingdom—then, as now—far beyond the limits of public security, as these were reckoned by every other European State. But the chief safety of England lay in the faith of the masses in the power of Parliament to devise measures of redress, and their confidence that the Sovereign would interpose no bar to remedial legislation. ”

“ As inaugurating an era of universal peace, which its most enthusiastic supporters expected it to do, the Great Exhibition of 1851 proved a failure; but as a means of diffusing among the people of Great Britain views about foreigners more enlightened than those they entertained before, as an impetus to commerce and manufacture and a stimulus to artistic production, the “Crystal Palace” has fully fulfilled the most sanguine anticipation. ”

“ From the first he discerned that the true way to attain Home Rule, if it might be attained at all, was to maintain scrupulous independence of both Conservatives and Liberals, to raise every possible obstruction in the way of legislation, and, in short, to render the Irish party so intolerable to all Governments, that Home Rule should be granted as the only means of getting out of an impossible situation. ”

“ On every side of the route down Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, and the Strand, and more westward still, through Pall Mall, St. James’s, and Mayfair, iridescent stars and crowned monograms glowed like titanic jewels from a thousand buildings.220 Fleet Street and the Strand were garlanded across with festoons of many-coloured globes, and the streets of this part of the town resembled nothing so much as an unending triumphal arch of rainbow-hued fire. Observed from Waterloo Place, Pall Mall seemed literally ablaze with general conflagration, so lavishly were the Clubs illuminated. ”

“ The only danger to the Prince Consort’s place in the affections of the British people in his later years was of the nature of that which over-took Aristides. There is a certain monotony in virtue, like that of uninterrupted serene weather, which weighs upon natures of a less lofty tenour. But no sooner was the Prince departed than the nation realised the value of the part he had performed, and it has never since ceased to be grateful for the energy he displayed in promoting every scheme of social or intellectual advancement, and stimulating the growth of commercial and industrial enterprise. ”

“ The stream of emigration westward which set in after the Irish famine in 1848 had resulted in creating a very large Irish population in the United States. All these emigrants had brought with them a bitter hatred of England, on whom they laid the blame of all the sufferings of their own people. They had found in America the true remedy for their wrongs, which, had they realised it, arose not so much from political, as from physical causes. ”

“ If, as a statesman, he could not command the same unanimous meed of “Well done!” he had established a standard of public life too often obscured in the heat of party strife. Vittoria, Salamanca, Talavera, Waterloo—the radiance from those far off conflagrations still glowed round that venerable head, but it was the honest purpose, bluntly spoken and fearlessly acted on, that won for Wellington a place in the hearts of his countrymen far more enduring than the reward of any commander, however successful—of any orator, however powerful. ”

“ In olden times, no doubt, the espousal of the heir of England to the daughter of Denmark would have implied a political and military alliance, offensive and defensive, between the two Crowns. But in Europe of the nineteenth century it is peoples, not princes, who hold the decrees of peace and war. It was this very fact which, shortly after the Prince of Wales’s marriage, seemed likely to precipitate a conflict between Great Britain and Denmark on the one side, and Austria and Prussia on the other. ”

“ May your life be prolonged, and peace, honour, and prosperity bless the people over whom you have been called to rule. May liberty nourish throughout your Empire under just and equal laws, and your government continue strong in the affections of all who live under it. ”

“ It is safe to say that no popularly-elected president of any existing Republic would be greeted in the streets of his capital by all classes of his fellow-citizens with a tithe of the respect, admiration, and affection accorded to our constitutional Monarch on this day of her Jubilee. The Sovereigns of the other European States—some of whom are wont to exact loyalty at the point of the sword—may well have envied the happy lot of a Queen whose chief protection is her people’s love. ”

“ Just as on June 22 we had furnished forth an Imperial pageant demonstrating the scope and strength of our dominion over the land surface of the globe, so now, on Saturday, June 26, we showed that our sovereignty over the seas is as far reaching and even more absolute.227 Without taking one single vessel from the Mediterranean, from the Chinese Seas, from Australia, India, or North America, we displayed at Spithead such a congregation of ships of war as filled with amazement and despair those representatives of alien Powers who knew our sea-going prowess only by repute. ”

“ A great military Power we might not be, but on the seas our dominion was, and must ever be, unquestionable. The chorus of admiration that arose from the Continental and American press showed that the necessity for this pre-eminence was recognised and allowed. If we had not known it long ourselves, our foreign critics, both friendly and hostile, had been aware that a great navy was the paramount condition of our national existence.
A circumstance that concerned the gallant men of the Colonial contingent who had taken part in the Jubilee Procession must here be touched on. ”

“ There was a great deal of brooding discontent in the country at the opening of Queen Victoria’s reign, which soon passed into a phase calling for active measures of repression. Some have recognised in the Chartist movement the chagrin of the working classes, who having imparted to the mills of State the impetus necessary to grind out political rights for their employers—the merchants, farmers, and middle class generally—found themselves no better equipped for political action than they were before. ”

“ The transit of news had been greatly accelerated over large tracts of the globe by the use of electricity, but it still took many weeks to convey intelligence between Great Britain and her Empire in India. Little did the people who assembled in London on June 23, 1857, to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, by which Bengal was added to the British Dominions, imagine that at that very moment Bengal was the scene of a conflict as mighty in scope as it was horrifying in detail. ”

“ The British monarchy reposes at present on surer foundations than military prowess or legislative sagacity can supply; it rests on the genuine affection of the people. Power has been committed to them during these sixty years in no illiberal measure; in a very practical sense they are masters, under the Almighty, of the destiny of the empire, for they can, by their votes, put those Ministers in power who shall do their pleasure. ”