hether to the
sense of justice or the spirit of compassion, he won a degree of
loyalty, affection, and confidence which few Sovereigns have ever
enjoyed. At home, we all recognize that, above the din and dust of our
hard-fought controversies, detached from party and attached only to
the common interests, we had in him an arbiter ripe in experience,
judicial in temper, at once a reverent worshipper of our traditions
and a watchful guardian of our constitutional liberties.

One is tempted, indeed constrained, on such an occasion as this to ask
what were the qualities which enabled a man called comparatively late
in life to new duties of unexampled complexity--what were the
qualities which in practice proved him so admirably fitted to the
task, and have given him an enduring and illustrious record among the
rulers and governors of the nations? I should be disposed to assign
the first place to what sounds a commonplace--but in its persistent
and unfailing exercise is one of the rarest of virtues--his strong,
abiding, dominating sense of public duty.

King Edward, be it remembered, was a man of many and varied interests.
He was a sportsman in the best sense, an ardent and discriminating
patron of the Arts, and as well equipped as any man of his time for
the give-and-take of social intercourse; wholly free from the
prejudices and narrowing rules of caste; at home in all companies; an
enfranchised citizen of the world. To such a man, endowed as he was by
nature, placed where he was by fortune and by circumstances, there
was open, if he had chosen to enter it, an unlimited field for
self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was
brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty
to the State always came first. In this great business community there
was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum
obligations--punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and
speech--were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. I
speak with the privilege of close experience when I say that wherever
he was, whatever may have been his apparent preoccupations, in the
transactions of the business of the State there were never any
arrears, there was never any trace of confusion, there was never any
moment of avoidable delay.

Next to these, Sir--I am still in the domain of practice and
administration--I should put his singular, perhaps an unrivalled, tact
in the management of men,