Women's Suffrage, she wrote to Mr.
Martin in royal rage--"The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone
who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of
'Woman's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor
feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and
propriety. Lady--ought to get a GOOD WHIPPING. It is a subject which
makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God
created men and women different--then let them remain each in their own
position. Tennyson has some beautiful lines on the difference of men and
women in 'The Princess.' Woman would become the most hateful, heartless,
and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and
where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker
sex? The Queen is sure that Mrs. Martin agrees with her." The argument
was irrefutable; Mrs. Martin agreed; and yet the canker spread.

In another direction Victoria's comprehension of the spirit of her age
has been constantly asserted. It was for long the custom for courtly
historians and polite politicians to compliment the Queen upon the
correctness of her attitude towards the Constitution. But such praises
seem hardly to be justified by the facts. In her later years Victoria
more than once alluded with regret to her conduct during the Bedchamber
crisis, and let it be understood that she had grown wiser since. Yet
in truth it is difficult to trace any fundamental change either in her
theory or her practice in constitutional matters throughout her life.
The same despotic and personal spirit which led her to break off the
negotiations with Peel is equally visible in her animosity towards
Palmerston, in her threats of abdication to Disraeli, and in her desire
to prosecute the Duke of Westminster for attending a meeting upon
Bulgarian atrocities. The complex and delicate principles of the
Constitution cannot be said to have come within the compass of her
mental faculties; and in the actual developments which it underwent
during her reign she played a passive part. From 1840 to 1861 the
power of the Crown steadily increased in England; from 1861 to 1901 it
steadily declined. The first process was due to the influence of the
Prince Consort, the second to that of a series of great Ministers.
During the first Victoria was in effect a mere accessory; during the
second the threads of power, which Albert had so laboriously collected,
inevitably