t be good for the country which was
good for trade; and it may certainly be said that for the majority of
trade interests she was as good as gold. Without caring too much for
dress (being herself wholly devoid of personal vanity) she ordered
dresses in abundance, and constantly varied the fashion, the color, and
the material, because she was given to understand that change and
variety stimulated trade. Her most revolutionary act had been to
readopt, one fine spring morning, the ample skirt of the crinoline
period in order to counteract the distress and shortage of work caused
in the textile trade by the introduction and persistence of the "hobble
skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary
law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a
sharp reaction a year later, which--after the artificial stimulus of the
previous season--threw more women out of employment than ever; new
fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation
wages--with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But
of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that
these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could
possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew
how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers,
accepted without demur the next wave of fashion that swept over Europe
from London _via_ Paris.

The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her
each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady
appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal
mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the
divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No
controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain--until
somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women
Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was
turned.

Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be
told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence
had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner,
the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse
established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were
medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal
consort under modern