The Press Monday, January 10, 1927. The Royal Tour.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18895, 10 January 1927, Page 8

The Press Monday, January 10, 1927. The Royal Tour.

It is doubtful if it has ever happened before that a King's son, setting sail for a tour of hia fathers dominions, has been farewelled on the shore by half a million people. It has certainly not happened in modem times, while if the crowd has some ancient parallel the occasion itself can have none. For to begin with, our ou:: is the only King in history v.-hose dominions extend right round the earth, and in the second place none ba: a British King ever ruled over a Continent twelve thousand miles away, inhabited by five million people of his own race and culture, wholly self-governed and yet all stoutly loyal to the Throne. The Germans, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch could all within modern times have sent Royal missions to remote possessions and been sure of a hearty welcome: they could not, in a single case, have seen the Royal messenger received by an entirely independent people, who had reached the same political development as the home laud's, and were still gladly subject to the home land's King. In other words, it is astonishing that so many hundreds of thousands of people from all over England should have found their way to Portsmouth last week, but it is far more astonishing that hundreds of thousands of people who have never seen England, and who never will see it, are waiting in Sydney and Melbourne and Auckland and Wellington and Christchurch to assure the King's son and daughter-in-law that they are as loyal as anyone in Great Britain and Ireland. Nor need we worry very much if at all these gatherings there are people who say either too much or too little, or who forget too soon or not so6n enough how the King's position has changed with the times. Some of the messages which appeared in the cables on Saturday morning belonged rather to the early Victorian era than to 1927, and some should never have been sent at all. But the story of the departure when read as a whole made a remarkable page in our constitutional history. When we remember that not years before, or months, but only a few weeks, the nations of Europe were expecting a constitutional crisis in Britain, or believed rather that it had actually come, we must regard it as an event that the Duke of York has had an even more tumultuous send-off than the nation gave his brother four or five years ago. Even the American people, who are at least culturally British, were being told eight weeks ago that Britain had reached the "crisis of her fate." Here, for example, is the opening sentence of an article in the December issue of Curfew* History, which is produced in the office of the tifeto York Times, and is wholly written by scholars and specialists:

The British Empire has reached a point which, as in the case of past empires, marks a crisis in its civilisation, and is to-day confronted with an amazing problem involving the life or death of. its organism. And yet five weeks after > that article appeared in print, and perhaps seven or eight after it was written, the world sees an extraordinary pageant which no dying Empire could stage. The whole meaning of, the Royal tour, as even those must admit who would like to think otherwise, is that British people are Royalists right round the earth. Although no one is prevented from being a Republican and expressing Republican sentiments there is no such thing as a Republican movement anywhere in the Empire. Even Radicals and Radical organs of v opinion—e.g., the New Statesman— admit quite frankly, and usually quite gladly, that King George's is the firmest throne in the world. There are fewer sentimental Royalists than there were, but far more convinced Royalists than there have ever been in the history of our race, and the Royal tour is the ceremonial expression of this fact. For the Duke and Duchess are not coming to Australia and New Zealand to stimulate our loyalty; they are coming to receive it, and so far as time and circumstances will permit, to enjoy it. To the world outside our Empire the tour is certainly a little more than it seems, and almost as much as outsiders suspect. It is no more within the Empire itself than a glad journey by the King's son to meet the King's most distant subjects.