One day towards the end of Queen Victoria's enormous reign, a provincial visitor asked a London policeman what was the meaning of the royal flag which floated above the sooty wilderness of Buckingham Palace. The policeman looked at his questioner with kindly condescension. "Mother's come' ome." he said.

And it is perfectly conceivable that, similarly questioned today, a London policeman might reply that "Dad's come 'ome." For the place which George V holds in the hearts of his people today is certainly as high as was Queen Victoria's.

With this paternal figure at its head, the British Empire has been bringing pressure upon Benito Mussolini. Now Mussolini may be many admirable things to his followers, but he is definitely not Dad. If he were, he would scarcely have turned Ethiopia into an interesting human laboratory for experiments with poison gas and the newest kind of bomb; he would be going about his business of empire-grabbing in a more discreet, British, or dad-like way.

Indeed, as the differences between England and Italy develop day by day, the human interest in them seems to converge more and more upon the difference between their two rulers. It is a difference between something very old-fashioned which still works, and something very newfangled which may work, if the world is sufficiently luckless. It is an abrupt and singular difference. For while George has identified himself completely with England, Benito Mussolini has identified Italy completely with Benito Mussolini. It remains to be seen which form of identification will prove the more lasting, and whether that instinctive devotion which George V obtains, unasked, from his subjects will be stronger than the vociferous adoration which Mussolini requires of all his followers who are not in exile or paradise.

George V's actual power may be negligible, but only very disgruntled or theoretical people would deny that it is his personality which holds together that reluctant entity, the British Empire. And the odd thing about the personality of George V is that it is not a personality at all. Ask the ordinary Englishman. "What is your king really like?' and he would be hard put to it to provide an answer. George V opens hospitals and libraries, makes speeches, presides at banquets, and shakes the hands of diplomats, footballers, and veterans with an unflagging, a phenomenal diligence; and once a year he rolls through London to open Parliament, a nodding idol in a preposterous coach. But what is his private, his intimate character? Nobody knows: at least, those eminent personages who do know have never given the world the benefit of their knowledge.

To be perfectly objective, it is somewhat surprising that the King should have obtained such a remarkable, such a personal stranglehold upon the hearts of his subjects. If one peers, regretfully and respectfully, through the haze of almost universal reverence which has surrounded him for many years, the resulting glimpse is far from romantic. No good fairy, it would seem, attended the cradle of George V, to shower upon the royal infant such gifts as charm, wit, beauty, passion, or profundity; in fact, she was rather noticeably absent. But it is precisely because she absented herself that His Majesty occupies so impregnable a position upon the British throne.

Had he been gifted above the ordinary man he might, in these fantastic and disorderly times, have succeeded—by some attempt at a coup d'etat, it may be, or some brilliant exercise of an autocratic will—in plunging both his country and his house into confusion and disaster. Luckily, he is not so gilled. Stolidity, impartiality, conscientiousness, diligence—these are his distinctive qualities, and these are qualities which are dearest to the Anglo-Saxon heart. It is these, Englishmen flatter themselves, which have made them what they are— though what they are it might be difficult to explain.

But though they have always admired these qualities in their statesmen (Mr. Baldwin, for instance, who smokes a pipe and quotes Mary Webb, is a popular Prime Minister—which would definitely not be the case if he smoked Turkish cigarettes and quoted Proust), Englishmen have never cared for them in their kings. And in consequence the most difficult, delicate, and exacting of all King George's tasks has been to make respectability a royal virtue instead of a royal drawback.

The reason why Englishmen did not care for blameless kings is a very simple one. England is the slave of tradition. And for a long time, for many hundreds of years, she had not been gifted with a truly moral king. Charles I was the last of them, and he lost his head. As for the Hanoverian monarchs, their record was scarcely an inspiring one. Georges I and II were distinguished for their foreign habits and their peculiar partiality for knobbly German mistresses; George III lacked these characteristics but lost, in succession, both America and his reason; George IV was an adipose rouged ogre with exquisite party manners ; and William IV, though he never achieved legitimate offspring, used to drive around London with a bevy of bastards who answered to the name of Fitz-Clarence. At last, the English came to expect their male monarchs to be either rakes or idiots; and when they discovered in Edward VII a king who was at once disreputable, intelligent, and a gentleman they were convinced that tradition could do no more.

It was against this tradition that George V fought, and, for many weary years, fought in vain. Today we have altogether forgotten the reception which was his when he first ascended the throne in 1910. He was young, insignificant, and unpopular: he was also (like most of his male predecessors) unfashionable and (unlike them all) blameless. His first personal intervention in political affairs, the Home Rule Conference of July, 1914, was greeted with volleys of indiscriminate abuse. He was hailed as a "traitor" and a "cipher," and one M. P. took occasion to remark, in an agitated article, that if His Majesty had been born into the working classes, he would indubitably have become a street-corner loafer. Such were the rewards, in pre-war England, of royal decency and royal conscience.

Nor, during the war, can it be said that George V was, in any deep sense, a national figure. The country rallied around him in the almost perfunctory manner of those who realise that they must rally around something, and that the Crown was the handiest object around which to do it. Long after the War was over, long after, in 1921, he performed the extremely courageous and dutiful feat of opening the Belfast Parliament in person—George V was still regarded as a figurehead, a puppet which, in obedience to custom and the Constitution, went through certain necessary motions in a satisfactory manner. Accepted but not loved, honored but not revered, the King labored dutifully in the service of his people, and might still be occupying himself in this thankless manner but for a piece of extremely good luck, or pneumonia, which came his way in December, 1928.

Death, which is the bane of common men, has proved itself something of a blessing to British royalty. It was after an unsavory gambling scandal, to which he was an innocent party, had made him temporarily odious to the Victorian public that Edward VII (then Prince of Wales) began to die. He recovered, to find that all was forgiven. And so when, in 1928, King George returned from a ten days' sojourn in the shadow of death, he returned to discover that not only England but all the civilized world had followed every phase of his illness with the most flattering solicitude.

At first, it is said, he was frankly incredulous: he begged his doctors to let him stay a little longer in London, so that he could enjoy this novel sensation. He was popular, he was beloved, he was the father of his people; but, up to that moment, neither he nor his people had been at all aware of it.

The metamorphosis was a curious one. An unimpeachably undistinguished gentleman, in whose German veins there moved, at best, a corpuscle or two of royal Scots blood, was suddenly the epitome of everything English. He was, his gratified subjects were surprised to find themselves remarking, not merely a good man, but a good man in a very English way—a good man, that is, of whom it could never be said that he had read a book of poetry, or loved music, or appreciated art, or that he was capable of making, even under the sternest provocation, a subtle remark. And English goodness is possibly more important to an Englishman than English blood.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that when His Majesty at last made an unconstitutional move, in 1931, by promoting the formation of a National Government, he should have lost nothing in prestige thereby. Ten years before, people would have muttered dark things about toppling him from his throne. In 1932, it is true. Mr. H. G. Wells—speaking before a group of teachers at an Oxford Summer Extension course—ventured upon a criticism of His Majesty's action; and the teachers replied with a shudder and a long cold silence. That silence, except for an occasional interruption, has remained unbroken ever since.

So, too, has His Majesty's almost legendary progress into the hearts of his people. In spite of the splendours of his jubilee, the luxury of his surroundings, and the traditional deference which accompanies his every step, the King's private life—so his subjects are wont to inform you—is such as might he led by any ordinary householder.

That this is profoundly untrue hardly matters: it has all the glamor, and all the comfort, of nonsense. After twenty-five years of rule, His Majesty has finally emerged as a bourgeois gentilhomme about whom there lingers some of the awful majesty of Melchisedec and Solomon and Caesar. The combination is an irresistible one. It is also, since it satisfies both simplicity and snobbery, an extremely democratic one. The fact that it is nonsensical as well, scarcely signifies.

Indeed, the importance of George V today finally lies in the fact that he alone represents, in a comparatively majestic form, the idea of Democracy. There is nothing in the idea of Democracy, perhaps, which could occasion us any great enthusiasm: the notion that the people can be governed by the people and for the people has, unfortunately, long since perished from the earth. But the notion that men are still free enough not to raise a "Viva" or a hand every five minutes, or march in step, or plunge into the protracted famine of a Five Year Plan, still remains. It is an old-fashioned, a backward notion; but, such as it is, it is embodied in the beribboned figure of George V. That he may remain to embody it for many years to come is, under the circumstances which obtain today, about the safest wish one could wish for a distracted world.