in the country was without:  he was permanent.  Politicians came and went, but the Prince was perpetually installed at the centre of affairs.  Who can doubt that, towards the end of the century, such a man, grown grey in the service of the nation, virtuous, intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole life-time of government, would have acquired an extraordinary prestige?  If, in his youth, he had been able to pit the Crown against the mighty Palmerston and to come off with equal honours from the contest, of what might he not have been capable in his old age?  What Minister, however able, however popular, could have withstood the wisdom, the irreproachability, the vast prescriptive authority, of the venerable Prince?  It is easy to imagine how, under such a ruler, an attempt might have been made to convert England into a State as exactly organised, as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, and as autocratically controlled, as Prussia herself.  Then perhaps, eventually, under some powerful leader—­a Gladstone or a Bright—­the democratic forces in the country might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in which the Monarchy would have been shaken to its foundations.  Or, on the other hand, Disraeli’s hypothetical prophecy might have come true.  “With Prince Albert,” he said, “we have buried our... sovereign.  This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown.  If he had outlived some of our ‘old stagers’ he would have given us the blessings of absolute government.”

The English Constitution—­that indescribable entity—­is a living thing, growing with the growth of men, and assuming ever-varying forms in accordance with the subtle and complex laws of human character.  It is the child of wisdom and chance.  The wise men of 1688 moulded it into the shape we know, but the chance that George I could not speak English gave it one of its essential peculiarities—­the system of a Cabinet independent of the Crown and subordinate to the Prime Minister.  The wisdom of Lord Grey saved it from petrifaction and destruction, and set it upon the path of Democracy.  Then chance intervened once more; a female sovereign happened to marry an able and pertinacious man; and it seemed likely that an element which had been quiescent within it for years—­the element of irresponsible administrative power—­was about to become its predominant characteristic and to change completely the direction of its growth.  But what chance gave chance took away.  The Consort perished in his prime; and the English Constitution, dropping the dead limb with hardly a tremor, continued its mysterious life as if he had never been.