The work of the Queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly underrated.  She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt invented the steam engine.  William IV., from whom we think of her as inheriting her Constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII.  William IV. was a limited monarch; that is to say, he had a definite, open, and admitted power in politics, but it was a limited power.  Queen Victoria was not a limited monarch; in the only way in which she cared to be a monarch at all she was as unlimited as Haroun Alraschid.  She had unlimited willing obedience, and unlimited social supremacy.  To her belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy; in which the Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment, was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does not drive.  Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of the monarchy.  She had her reward.  For while William IV.’s supremacy may be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen’s supremacy might be called a prophecy.  By lifting a figure purely human over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic fashion the abiding, if unreasoning, hope which dwells in all human hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in the noble old language of mediaeval monarchy, “a fountain of mercy and a fountain of honour.”

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.