King John of Jingalo | Page 5

remarkable that, as the outcome of
so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing
of the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still
less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country
could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor,
or public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed
up in the proposition that anything must 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 conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in
these more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the
Burghers of Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for
their widows and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long
since ceased to be within the functions of a queen.
Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or,
rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices--the wives and
daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and military
dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and capacity of
her own sex. Other women--pioneers of education and of reform,
rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had--the majority of
them--lived and died without once coming in contact with the official
leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the
official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and
dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in
their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their

fighting days were over and their work done.
On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her
patronage there was not a single woman--or a married one either; but
when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses.
She was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice
to her.
IV
A king and a queen take so long to describe that the reader will have
almost forgotten how we left them at the breakfast table. But the Queen
had her letters and the King his newspapers, and there, when we return
to them in the historic present, they still are.
Yes, there they sit, an institutional expression of the nation's general
complacence with the state of civilization at which it has arrived,
interpreting in decorous form the voice of the articulate majority--the