being. Without any Acts of Parliament to control or guide
them--merely at the delicately expressed wish of her Majesty--thousands
of charming, wealthy, and influential women would waste spare hour upon
hour and expend small fortunes of pocket-money in keeping uncomfortable
things comfortably going in their accustomed grooves. It was calculated
that the Queen's patronage had the immediate effect of trebling the
subscription list of any charity, while the mere withdrawal of her name
spelt bankruptcy. Her Majesty was patron to forty-nine charities and
subscribed to all of them. For the five largest she appeared annually on
a crimson-covered platform, insuring thereby a large supply of silk
purses containing contributions, and a full report in the press of all
the speeches. It was her rule to open two bazaars regularly each summer,
to lay the foundation-stones of three churches, orphanages, or hospitals
(whichever happened to require the greatest amount of money for their
completion), to attend the prize-giving at the most ancient of the
national charity schools, and every winter, when distress and
unemployment were at their worst, to go down to the Humanitarian Army's
soup-kitchen, and there taste, from a tin mug with a common pewter
spoon, the soup which was made for the poor and destitute. This last
performance, which took so much less time and trouble than all the rest,
proved each year the most popular incident of her Majesty's useful and
variegated public life, for every one felt that it provided in the
nicest possible way an antidote to the advance of socialistic theories.
The papers dealt with it in leading articles; and the lucky casuals who
happened to drop in on the day when her Majesty paid the surprise visit
arranged for her by her secretaries would report that they had never
tasted such good soup in all their born days.

It may truthfully be said that the Queen never spent an idle day, and
never came to the end of one without the consciousness of having done
good. All the more, therefore, is it remarkable that, as the outcome of
so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing of
the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still
less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country
could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor, or
public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed up in
the proposition that anything mus