As for that more facile, after-dinner attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy.

In the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power.

So long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty knows no bounds.
The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got it.

There could not be a better statement of the methods which she employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling's: "Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing, Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King." It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus established was better fitted for the home market than for export.

But this does not affect the fact that, at the end of the process, the English people were in the saddle.