y Republicanism was the creed of many ardent working-class Radicals
in England. Charles Bradlaugh was its chief exponent, and both Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain and the late Sir Charles Dilke were regarded as Republicans
before they entered Gladstone's Ministry in 1880. The Republican movement
waned before Bradlaugh's death. He himself was "led to feel that agitation
for an ideal form of government was less directly fruitful than agitation
against the abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his
life, his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the
Constitution."[88]

With the rise of the Socialist movement in England in 1884-5, and the
celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in 1887, Republicanism became utterly
moribund, and nothing save an attempt on the part of the sovereign to take
a definite side in party politics, or a notorious lapse from the morals
required of persons in office of State, could revive it.

The interest in Socialism was fatal to the Republican movement, because it
turned the enthusiasm of the active spirits in democratic politics from the
desire for radical changes in the _form_ of government, to the crusade for
economic changes, and the belief in a coming social revolution. The
existence of monarchy seemed a small and comparatively unimportant affair
to men and women who were hoping to get poverty abolished, and the
landlords and capitalists expropriated either by direct revolution, or by
the act of a House of Commons, dominated by working men with Socialist
convictions.

The national celebrations at the Queen's Jubilee in 1887 marked the
beginning of the popular revival in pageantry and official ceremonial. In
the Church of England this revival began some forty years earlier, and it
has, in our day, changed the whole conduct of public worship. The revival
of Roman Catholicism in England with its processions and solemn ritual has
been equally significant. By gratifying the common human instinct for
spectacle and drama the monarchy has gained the popular affections.

The Whigs scoffed at pageants and symbols; the earlier Puritans had
proscribed ceremonial as savouring of idolatry, and feared any
manifestation of beauty as a snare of the devil. In the latter half of the
nineteenth century, England began to throw off the shackles of Puritanism,
and to lose all interest in Whiggery. The new democracy was neither coldly
Deist, nor austerely Republican. It has shown no inclina