"CORONATION MILESTONES"
THE Coronation of another King and Queen marks a mile- stone in the life of the country and the Commonwealth, the fourth to be set up in the last hundred years. It is a fitting moment to take stock briefly of the national life in various fields—as we do in eight special articles which begin on page 796 of this issue—marking progress, where progress is revealed, marking at any rate difference and development, between the Coronation dates of the century —1838, 1902, 1911 and 1937. The world which sees the Coronation of King George VI is a different world in almost all mspects from that which saw the Coronation of Queen Victoria, and different in many respects even from the world of 1911, when his father was crowned. The conception of kingship itself, as Professor Ernest Barker points out in his very interesting article, has changed. Social customs, as Mr. E. F. Benson shows, have changed materially. The habits of everyday life, our food, our pleasures, our means of learning what is happening about us, have evolved notably since 1838 and even since 1902. In the religious world, as the Dean of Exeter strikingly demonstrates, the evolution has been no less marked ; to say that we have travelled from the Oxford Movement to the Oxford Groups is too facile an epigram, but there is enough in it to justify amply a brief survey of a century's development of religious thought. Only parts of the field are covered here ; limita- tions of space must be observed, and certain inevitable gaps are manifest Even so the attempt to go back to three or four past milestones and see what life looked like from those vantage-points will, it is hoped, be held to have its uses.
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