present time to
determine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this great
occasion. Certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would come
most gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time.
They may be done quite soon. Upon the doing of them wait great masses of
public opinion. The first of these things is for the British monarchy to
sever itself definitely from the German dynastic system, with which it
is so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make its
intention of becoming henceforth more and more British in blood as well
as spirit, unmistakably plain. This idea has been put forth quite
prominently in the _Times_. The king has been asked to give his
countenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set up
by George the Third, upon the marriage of the Royal Princes with
British, French and American subjects. The British Empire is very near
the limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of Germans. The choice of
British royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be
indefinitely delayed. Were it made now publicly and boldly, there can be
no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, a
considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the Empire. There are
times when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a little
anticipate occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions perforce;
kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisive
kings who lose their crowns.

No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriages
would gradually merge that family into the general body of the British
peerage. Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an
associated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardly
more functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer.
Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view.

It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal
caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in the
royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the British
king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the
nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican
institutions. A thing that is productive of an enormous amount of
republican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion--I believe an
ill-founded suspicion--that there are influences at work at cour