The After-glow of a Great Reign

l sorrow, so with public anxiety. It has become now common property that, in the dark days of December, 1899, the Queen was the one who refused to be depressed in her court; when disaster followed disaster it was the Queen who, by her moral courage, kept up the spirits of those around her, and who, with a perfect trust in her soldiers and sailors, and with an absolute confidence in the justice of her cause, went steadily, brightly, and cheerfully on with her work, upheld by the moral courage which I put before you and before myself as our example for to-day.

And so, once again, her moral courage took the form--a rare form, too, in these days--of the courage of her own opinions. One statesman has told us that he never differed from a matured opinion of his Sovereign without a great sense of responsibility; another, that when he once acted directly against it he found that he was wrong and she was right. Another has pointed out how we have lost among the crowned heads of Europe, in her personal influence