SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE


We are quite as domestic as the English, but with us the family is of
the personal life, while with them it is of the general life, so that
when their domesticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one
feels it strange. One has read of something like this without the sense
of it which constantly penetrates one in London. One must come to
England in order to realize from countless little occasions, little
experiences, how entirely English life, public as well as private, is an
affair of family. We know from our reading how a comparatively few
families administer, if they do not govern, but we have still to learn
how the other families are apparently content to share the form in which
authority resides, since they cannot share the authority. At the very
top I offer the conjecture towards the solution of that mystery which
constantly bewilders the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty--is,
of course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the American is
that it is revered because it is the _royal_ family. But possibly a
truer interpretation of the fact would be that it is dear and sacred to
the vaster British public because it is the royal _family_. A
bachelor king could hardly dominate the English imagination like a royal
husband and father, even if his being a husband and father were not one
of the implications of that tacit Constitution in whose silence English
power resides. With us, family has less and less to do with society,
even; but with the English it has more and more to do, since the royal
family is practically without political power, and not only may, but
almost must, devote itself to society. It goes and comes on visits to
other principalities and powers; it opens parliaments; it lays corner-
stones and presides at the dedication of edifices of varied purpose; it