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In the universal reverence paid to the Queen there was hardly anywhere a
touch of snobbishness. Snobbishness, in so far as it went out towards
former sovereigns, went out to them as aristocrats rather than as kings,
as heads of that higher order of men, who were almost angels or demons
in their admitted superiority to common lines of conduct. This kind of
reverence was always a curse: nothing can be conceived as worse for the
mass of the people than that they should think the morality for which
they have to struggle an inferior morality, a thing unfitted for a
haughtier class. But of this patrician element there was hardly a trace
in the dignity of the Queen. Indeed, the degree to which the middle and
lower classes took her troubles and problems to their hearts was almost
grotesque in its familiarity. No one thought of the Queen as an
aristocrat like the Duke of Devonshire, or even as a member of the
governing classes like Mr. Chamberlain. Men thought of her as something
nearer to them even in being further off; as one who was a good queen,
and who would have been, had her fate demanded, with equal cheerfulness,
a good washerwoman. Herein lay her unexampled triumph, the greatest and
perhaps the last triumph of monarchy. Monarchy in its healthiest days
had the same basis as democracy: the belief in human nature when
entrusted with power. A king was only the first citizen who received the
franchise.
Both royalty and religion have been accused of despising humanity, and
in practice it has been too often true; but after all both the
conception of the prophet and that of the king were formed by paying
humanity the supreme compliment of selecting from it almost at random.
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