Evening Post. TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1919. THE BRITISH THRONE

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 128, 3 June 1919, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1919. THE BRITISH THRONE

It is a little more than nine years since King George V. came to the throne, the peaceful ruler of an Empire as devoted to peace and as ill-prepared for war as any great Empire ever was. Through no desire of the King or his subjects, who but took up a challenge that they could not refuse, the Empire has been engaged in the greatest war on record. It has been wrestling for its life with what five years ago was the most powerful military machine that the world had ever seen. The great machine is shattered, and the Empire is emerging victorious from the ordeal. With sadly depleted resources, and loaded with a debt which must remain a. grievous burden for many years to come, the Empire has nevertheless acquired from the war a moral unity, a solidarity of sentiment, which the slow processes of peace might have required a generation or more to accomplish. It is. possible that even an indefinitely prolonged peace might have failed to accomplish so much, and that the advances towards unity which had distinguished the last thirty or forty years before the war might have been checked or reversed by centrifugal forces. Our enemy has indeed been our. helper. The war which was to have captured the world for the military autocracy of Prussia has made it safe for democracy. The hammer which was to have smashed the British Empire has helped to weld it into a closer unity. The strength and the spirit which ancient Rome derived, according to her poet, from the blows of Carthage have come to Britain also in a similar way. But to the superficial observer the effect of the Great War upon Britain presents a still more striking paradox. The war which has made the world safe for democracy has also made it safe for the greatest of monarchies. The two great Allies with whom Britain entered the war were France and Russia. France had gob rid of her monarchy and proclaimed herself a republic during the last and disastrous struggle with Germany into which Napoleon 111. had led her unprepared. Russia, under 'the pressure of the present war, has taken a similar course, and in the name of democracy substituted for the autocracy of the Romanoffs the still more tyrannous and murderous oligarchy of Lenin. The example o£ Russia and the stress of war have since shaken half the thrones of Europe. Yet the throne of George V., which seemed to Wilhelm 11. and his worshippers so unsubstantial a, thing that it must topple over as soon as they said j the word, stands more securely to-day i than it e,ver did. All the unrest which, ! for the States of the Empire as for every country, is part of tha price of more than four years of war, not merely leaves the security of the British, throne absolutely untouched, but rather serves to throw it into stronger relief. There is. a parados here to which- even the doctrinaire arrogance of Germany might well pay some profitable attention. How is it that its confident prophecies of doom for an effete Empire' and a shadowy monarchy have not been realised? The sec Vet of the strength of Britain has been explained in a manner that may be repeated without offence to the most intimate of our Allies, for the explanation was given to an English audience by a Frenchman who was recently lecturing in London. Of the two essentials of a secure and progressive civilisation— order and liberty—Germany, he said, had realised order without liberty, France liberty without order, Russia had realised neither, and Britain both. Like all general statements, the remark is not to be taken too literally, but it is undoubtedly to the success with which tho instincts and circumstances of the British people hl-ve enabled them to combine the ideals of order and liberty that their proud position in the world is mainly due. Without this combination the maritime enterprise which .was forced upon the British, people by their geographical position could never have enabled them to develop into a great colonising Power. The " pax Britaimica " has followed their commerce round tho world, founded free communities in nil parts of it, and brought millions of men differing widely in racs, .religion, colour, und civilisation ,Luto wiUing and. .permanent allegiance,

In this way the British Empire succeeded in spreading wherever a ship could sail; in sprawling, 'oy a lucky series of accidents as the Germans would have us believe, over most of the choice sites of the globe, yet constituting when all was done " nothing but a trading monopoly, a. chain of forts, a great fleot, and a monumental impudence." But these confident German calculations overlooked two points that were essential and not accidental. This huge, unwieldy, amorphous mass, with all its looseness of structure and divergence of aims and interests, was unified by two commanding influences—faith in ths same ideals of liberty and justice and allegiance to the same throne. As the keystone of the Imperial arch, the symbol and bond of unity for which no elective machinery could provide an adequate substitute, the throne has attained an even more essential importance than it possessed in the days of "Little England." Gratitude for--our debt to this emblem of our ordered liberty, this pledge of a union which the greatest of wars has only served to strengthen, should fill our hearts on this, the first King's Birthday after the armistice.