TO THE LONG REIGN
THE splendour of the Coronation of Elizabeth II is over. It was a bright symbol, and its light will not fade quickly. Yet if the Queen lives as long as her loyal subjects have hoped, prayed, sung and, in the past few glorious days, shouted at the tops of their voices, most of us will never see another Coronation. On normal expectations some three out of every five people now living in the United Kingdom will have to make the best of the memory of this one.
In any case full participation in the ceremony could only be for a few of the Queen's subjects throughout the world. On the broadest view it is still the imaginative effort of unity that matters most. Seven thousand people in Westminster Abbey were, for a few hours, at the heart of it all. But all that that meant, in the longer perspectives of space and time, was that a smaller effort of imagination was required of them than of the millions throughout the Commonwealth to whom the crowning of the Queen also meant the reaffirmation of unity and loyalty. The meaning of the Coronation does not lie simply in its immediate emotional impact. It is in the deeper, quieter and more staid mental attitudes that it sustains and renews rather than creates.
The ceremony will have added nothing new to the permanent and continuing structure and spirit of the Commonwealth. Its virtue lies in its vivid repetition of a great historic act. If God saves the Queen for fifty years, it will still be, for the Queen's subjects, their faith and their efforts that preserve them and their heritage. But her example, her inspiration, and the prospect of stability held out by a young Sovereign can strengthen faith and put new heart into the effort. Comparable with the extension of the influence pf the Coronation in space —its world-wide meaning to all British people—may be its influence in time. The Queen will do her duty. Her sense of complete dedication was clearly known, and solemnly affirmed by herself, long before her Coronation. It is the duty of her peoples to match her example.
The institution of monarchy is an aid, not a hindrance, to the maintenance of- Britain's prestige and popularity in the world. Indeed, it is among the most stoutly republican of Britain's friends outside the Commonwealth that there is to be found the liveliest envy of the monarchy -and of the cere- monial that attends it upon great occasions. The Queen's face) looks out from French newspapers as well as from our own, and in America, where strait-laced, puritanical, anti-monarchist traditions are still alive, the advertisers offer " Coronation" cosmetics, jewellery and clothes to a public which sees nothing incongruous in the situation. A wholly rational man, that strange abstraction, might well be puzzled to explain away this genuine resurgence of popular belief in and respect for an institution stripped of all but the most nominal prerogatives and a family extraordinary only in the fact of its royalty and its devotion to constitutional duties. But there seems little doubt that the secure existence of the monarchy, set above all ideological and political contention and yet in some sense far more accessible to the public imagina- tion than any politician can be, answers a need which is all the more deeply felt for the fragmentation of life caused by the decay of traditional values.
The central Elizabethan virtues were courage and enterprise. Elizabeth II may still have as many opportunities as Elizabeth 1 for the display of courage. She may not, within the accumu- lated rules of constitutional monarchy, find as many oppor- tunities for personal enterprise. But she can still point the way. There is not the slightest sign that the creative energies of the British people are any less now than they have been in the past four hundred years of political and material progress. All that is needed is the effort to apply them.
A nation that can still produce men who climb to the top of Everest, who give one example after another in Korea of the highest military virtue, and who invent and fly the best passenger aircraft in the world, is certainly not lacking in imagination and flair. But it must be sure of the steady back° ground of hard work. The old link that enabled gentlemen to instruct their retainers to die for them in battle, or nineteenth• century industrial magnates to require their workmen to die for them, more slowly, in satanic mills, is broken. A neW link must be forged between those who lead by merit of brainS and inventive genius, and those who translate leadership by hard work into national prosperity. if the Queen and het husband can, by imagination, example and good advice help to forge that new link the worst of our problems will be solved•
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