There is a conviction widespread among us--his own words, perhaps, have
done most to create it--that King George is inspired, as no recent
predecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that his
is to be no rôle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
processes of our national and imperial development. That greater public
life which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told,
taken hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity and
correlation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents,
but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.

Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable democracy
of individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such a Prince.
Our consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vast
possibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has never
really slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the Boer War.
Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditions
of party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness,
has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, against
stupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every department
of life. We have come to see more and more clearly how little we can
hope for from politicians, societies and organised movements in these
essential things. It is this that has invested the energy and manhood,
the untried possibilities of the new King with so radiant a light of
hope for us.

Think what it may mean for us all--I write as one of that great
ill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside the
echoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society--if our
King does indeed care for these wider and profounder things! Suppose we