f George IV., and
what I most of all regret is the part that he played in the politics of
the period. Englishmen to-day have at length decided that Royalty shall
not set foot in the political arena. I do not despair that some day we
shall place politics upon a sound commercial basis, as they have already
done in America and France, or leave them entirely in the hands of the
police, as they do in Russia. It is horrible to think that, under our
existing regime, all the men of noblest blood and highest intellect
should waste their time in the sordid atmosphere of the House of
Commons, listening for hours to nonentities talking nonsense, or
searching enormous volumes to prove that somebody said something some
years ago that does not quite tally with something he said the other
day, or standing tremulous before the whips in the lobbies and the
scorpions in the constituencies. In the political machine are crushed
and lost all our best men. That Mr. Gladstone did not choose to be a
cardinal is a blow under which the Roman Catholic Church still staggers.
In Mr. Chamberlain Scotland Yard missed its smartest detective. What a
fine voluptuary might Lord Rosebery have been! It is a platitude that
the country is ruled best by the permanent officials, and I look forward
to the time when Mr. Keir Hardie shall hang his cap in the hall of
No. 10 Downing Street, and a Conservative working man shall lead Her
Majesty's Opposition. In the lifetime of George, politics were not a
whit finer than they are to-day. I feel a genuine indignation that he
should have wasted so much of tissue in mean intrigues about ministries
and bills. That he should have been fascinated by that splendid fellow,
Fox, is quite right. That he should have thrown himself with all his
heart into the storm of the Westminster election is most natural. But it
is awful inverideed to find him, long after he had reached man's estate,
indulging in back-stair intrigues with Whigs and Tories. It is, of
course, absurd to charge him with deserting his first friends, the
Whigs. His love and fidelity were given, not to the Whigs, but to the
men who led them. Even after the death of Fox, he did, in misplaced
piety, do all he could for Fox's party. What wonder that, when he found
he was ignored by the Ministry that owed its existence to him, he turned
his back upon that sombre couple, the 'Lords G. and G.,' whom he had
always hated, and went over to the Tories? Among the Tories he hoped