more and more in sympathy with public sentiment and in obedience to the public will. While still preserving its social rank, it is to-day the servant, and not the master. The aristocracy governs, the democracy rules, and rules with a mastery too dreaded, and sometimes obeyed with too much docility.

In 1839 the Chartists were divided into two classes, the partisans of moral force, and the partisans of material force; the men of theories, and the violent agitators, ready to come to blows with a society which refused to them that which they regarded as their right. The first demonstration of these practical demagogues took place at Birmingham, between the 4th and the 15th of July. The excitement was factitious, for manufactures were prosperous, and most of the working-classes already possessed the right of suffrage, but the city was in a panic until the rioters had been forcibly suppressed. The same scenes were enacted at Sheffield and at Newport. In the latter city, a former magistrate, well known for his advanced opinions, headed the working-men who rose in the name of the Chartist programme. He led them when they entered Newport on the 3d of December. The mayor of the city was attacked in the inn where he had established his head-quarters, and was wounded while defending himself. The troops soon repulsed the ill-disciplined multitude; the leaders were arrested, tried, and finally transported.

The agitation was destined to continue, for it arose from the condition of society itself, and from that instinctive and bitter envy which lies at the bottom of so many hearts; but it was not destined to shake to its foundations the life of the English people. In 1848, when all the thrones of Europe trembled, after the fall of Louis Philippe in France, a Chartist demonstration took place in London, and was immediately met by an impressive manifestation of the conservative spirit of the great majority of the people. "There was a great Chartist meeting

to-day at Kennington, near London," wrote M. Guizot, then in exile in England, to M. de Barante, his friend, "twelve or fifteen thousand, they say, who assembled to demand the half of what the Parisian Communists require. The walls are placarded with an official prohibition of all meetings or processions, exactly like Delessert's proclamation three weeks ago. Everybody, from the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Lincoln on the one side, down to the two thousand coal-heavers of the Thames on the other, all the aristocracy and all the middle class to its lowest degree, rallied to the government, and were sworn in as special constables in case of a riot, and there will be at Kennington more volunteers to repress than there will be to make an outbreak. This is grand, but for us a sad thing to see."

The Chartist tumults were not yet appeased, and their leader Fergus O'Connor, presided over meetings and over mobs, when Queen Victoria, upon opening Parliament on the 16th of January, 1840, announced to the nation her intention to marry her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a union which she hoped would be as conducive to the interests of her people as to her own personal happiness. "Her Majesty has," said Sir Robert Peel, in the House of Commons, "the singular good fortune to be able to gratify her private feelings while she performs her public duty, and to obtain the best guarantee for happiness by contracting an alliance founded on affection."

For some time the queen had been attached to her cousin, who was nearly of her own age, and had been twice in England. The marriage had already been for some months decided on when the queen announced it in Parliament.

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"In the year 1888," says M. Guizot, in his preface to the Speeches of Prince Albert," "two centuries will have been completed since William of Orange, a foreign prince, and the husband of an English princess, was called into England by a revolution. There was doubt and embarrassment about the

extent of the power which he should exercise. 'And now,' says Lord Macaulay, 'William thought that the time had come when he ought to explain himself. He accordingly sent for Halifax, Danby, Shrewsbury, and some other political leaders of great note, and with that air of stoical apathy under which he had, from a boy, been in the habit of concealing his strongest emotions, addressed to them a few deeply meditated and weighty words.

A strong

"He had hitherto, he said, remained silent; he had used neither solicitation nor menace; he had not even suffered a hint of his opinions or wishes to get abroad; but a crisis had now arrived at which it was necessary for him to declare his intentions. He had no right and no wish to dictate to the convention. All that he claimed for himself was the privilege of declining any office which he felt that he could not hold with honor to himself and with benefit to the public. party was for a regency. It was for the Houses to determine whether such an arrangement would be for the benefit of the nation. He had a decided opinion on that point; and he thought it right to say distinctly that he would not be regent. Another party was for placing the princess on the throne and for giving him during her life, the title of king and such a share in the administration as she might be pleased to allow him. He could not stoop to such a post. He esteemed the princess as much as it was possible for man to esteem woman ; but not even from her would he accept a subordinate and a precarious place in the government. He was so made that he could not submit to be tied to the apron-strings even of the best of wives. He did not desire to take any part in English affairs, but if he did consent to take a part there was one part only which he could usefully or honorably take. If the estates offered him the crown for life he would accept it. If not, he should, without repining, return to his native country.'

"William III. was right. When he was called into England he was thirty-eight years of age. For sixteen years he had defended a great European cause against the greatest king in Europe. England had called upon him to come and defend for her, and upon her soil, this same cause by bringing a revolution to a happy and successful issue. The crown of England was above all a great additional strength in carrying on his struggle upon the continent. To fulfil the mission laid upon him he had need of all the power and all the prestige of royalty. If he had accepted a lower position, were it lower but in appearance only, he would have been weakened, instead of strengthened, he would have lost instead of gaining.

"That which he insisted upon, while essential for his public. career, required no effort, and occasioned no disturbance in his domestic relations. His wife, the Princess Mary, thought and wished as he did. When she learned that there was hesitation at London, in respect to the power and the title with which her husband should be invested, she wrote to Lord Danby that she was the Prince's wife, that she had no other desire than to be his subject, that the most cruel injury that any one could do her would be to establish a rivalry between herself and him, and that she should never regard as her friend, any person who should form such a plan. For eleven years, William had been king over his household; there even he would have suffered a certain diminution of authority and dignity if he had not had equal rights and powers with his wife in the new kingdom.

"When, in 1840, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, married Queen Victoria, his position was very different; he was young and unknown to the world. He married a young queen hereditarily established upon her throne, in a country most foreign to any necessity or any chance of revolution, a country governed as strongly as it was liberally. In his native land he had done nothing; in the new country to which he came,

there was nothing for him to do; England asked of him only to be a good husband to the queen, and to occasion in her government neither disturbance nor embarrassment.

"Guided either by the excellence of his own judgment or by the wise counsels of his advisers, Prince Albert understood admirably the situation, and adapted his conduct to it with equal dignity and good sense. He was at once active and modest, never seeking, in fact, avoiding any vain show of taking part in the government. Although very seriously occupied in the public affairs of England, and the interests of the crown worn by his wife, he was for twenty-one years Queen Victoria's first subject and her first counsellor, her confidential and only secretary, silently associated in all her deliberations, in all her resolutions, skilful in enlightening her and in seconding her in her relations with her Cabinet without embarrassing or offending the ministers themselves, exercising at the side of the throne a salutary and judicious influence, yet never going out of his place or interfering with the action of a constitutional government.

"For these twenty-one years, Prince Albert was in his domestic life as excellent a husband as he was a wise and useful counsellor. He lived with the queen, his wife, in the most tender affection, assiduously occupied, in concert with herself, in the education of their children, uniting to a serenity of character and the charm of an affectionate nature, a suitable measure of conjugal and paternal authority, filling and animating the life of those about him, and giving to his royal family as much happiness as he received from them. It was a career as beautiful as it was unostentatious, rare in the domestic history of thrones, and pursued by Prince Albert without effort, without alternating periods of good and bad, by the natural impulse of an upright and elevated mind, an affectionate heart, and a conscience as sensitive as it was enlightened."