ABSTRACT
The metaphysics of limited monarchy do not easily lend themselves to critical discussion. The Monarchy, to put it bluntly, has been sold to the democracy as the symbol of itself; and so nearly universal has been the chorus of eulogy which has accompanied the process of sale that the rare voices of dissent have hardly been heard. No one can say of the Victorian Monarchy that-housing, perhaps, apart-it displayed any serious interest in questions affecting the well-being of the people. The famous picture of the Victorian Monarchy drawn by Bagehot seventy years ago is, in the face of the Letters of Queen Victoria, no longer a tenable portrait. The reader of Queen Victoria's Letters and the Esher Papers will not need to be told that these are rights of high importance, the exercise of which ranges from the minutiae of military etiquette to the gravest issues of domestic and foreign policy.
