(according to Lord Malmesbury) as to
have averted a possible conflict with Germany.

The political power of the Crown and its wearer is proven to exist in
the dismissal of Lord Palmerston for his rash recognition of the French
_coup d'etat_; in the occasional exercise of the right of excluding
certain individuals from the Government--notably the case of Mr.
Labouchere a decade ago; in such direct exercise of influence as the
Queen's intervention in the matter of the Irish Church Disestablishment
Bill as related by the late Archbishop Tait. The Imperial influence of
the Sovereign has been shown in more than merely indirect ways. The
Queen's refusal to approve the first draft of the Royal Proclamation for
India in 1858 and her changes in the text were declared by Lord Canning
to have averted another insurrection. Her personal determination to send
the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860 and her own visit to Ireland in
one of the last years of her reign were cases of actual initiative and
active policy. South Africa owed to the late Queen the several visits of
the Duke of Edinburgh and the exhibition of her well-known sympathy with
the views of Sir George Grey--who, had he been allowed a free hand,
would have consolidated and united those regions many years ago and
averted the recent disastrous struggle.

Australia owed to her the compliment of various visits from members of
the Royal family, the kindly personal treatment of its leaders and a
frequently expressed desire for its unity in one great and growing
nationality--British in allegiance and connection and power; Australian
in local authority, patriotism and development. India was indebted to
its Queen-Empress for continued sympathy and wise advice to its
Governors-General; for the phraseology in the Proclamation after the
Mutiny, already referred to, which rendered the new conditions of
allegiance comprehensible and satisfactory to the native mind; for the
important visit of the Prince of Wales to that country in 1877; and for
the support given to Lord Beaconfield's Imperial policy of asserting
England's place in the world, of purchasing the Suez Canal shares in
order to help in keeping the route to the East and of paving the way for
that acquisition of Egypt and the Soudan which has since made Cecil
Rhodes' dream of a great British-African empire a realizable
probability. The Colonies, as a whole, owed to Queen Victoria a
condition of government which made peaceful