THE zeal which Albert, Prince Consort, evinced in furthering good
works,—his sympathy with the wants of the poor, their bodily health and
comfort, and their intellectual and moral culture,—will long endear his
memory to the grateful people of the country of his adoption.
It was a characteristic of his genius that he would never consent to
take the lead in any movement until he had, as far as possible,
satisfied himself of its proper object and practicability. That he fully
understood and appreciated the requirements of the age, is evident from
the following passage in one of his manly Addresses:
“Whilst formerly the greatest mental energies strove at universal
knowledge, and that knowledge was confined to the few, now they are
directed on specialities, and in these again even to the minutest
points; but the knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of the
community at large; for, whilst formerly discovery was wrapped in
secrecy, the publicity of the present day causes, that no sooner is a
discovery or invention made, than it is already improved upon and
surpassed by competing efforts. The products of all quarters of the
globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is
the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production
are intrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital. So man is
approaching a more complete fulfilment of that great and sacred mission
which he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after
the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the
Almighty governs His creation, and, by making these laws his standard of
action, to conquer nature to his use; himself a Divine instrument.
Science discovers these laws of power, motion, and transformation;
industry applies them to the raw matter, which the earth yields us in
abundance, but which become valuable only by knowledge. Art teaches us
the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our productions
forms in accordance to them.” Again: “To the human mind nothing is so
fascinating as progress. It is not what we have long had that we most
prize. We highly prize new accessions; but we enjoy almost unconsciously
gifts, of far more value, we have long been in possession of. This is
our nature; thus we are constituted. It is not surprising, therefore,
that we should have a peculiar relish for new discoveries. The interest
of discovery, however, is not permanent. For a time we are dazzled by
its brilliancy; but gradually the impression fades away, and at last is
lost entirely in the splendour of some fresh discovery which carries
with it the charm of novelty. When we reflect upon this, we cannot help
perceiving in how very different a state the world would be from what it
is if mankind in the beginning had been in the possession of all the
knowledge we now have, and there had been no progress ever since.”
There is no royal death within memory of the present generation which
has caused such grave and regretful reflection as the sudden manner in
which the Prince Consort was taken from our beloved Sovereign and her
family, at the close of the year 1861. The nearest approach to the
public sorrow upon this melancholy occasion was the universal sympathy
expressed on the loss of the Princess Charlotte, in 1817, when the
mother and offspring were at once swept by the hand of death into the
same grave! Put widespread as was the lamentation of the people for
their hopes being thus crushed, it differed in this respect from the
sorrow for the Prince Consort,—that in the one case expectation was
blighted, but in the other realisation was extinguished when the fruits
of superior intelligence were fast ripening into the maturity of true
greatness.
Since the death of the Prince the country has learned the full extent of
its loss by this sad event. Yet it was plainly asserted in the _Leader_
newspaper, ten years ago, that the Prince was “becoming the most popular
man in England;” and the reader was assured that the above paper was
written to put the Prince’s “position and his services in the point of
view in which we may comprehend him, and be grateful to him.” This
statement was unheeded at the time it was made; but, in the year
following, other journalists had discovered that the Prince had some
voice in English foreign policy,—a charge which was admitted to be true
by Ministers in Parliament. Public attention was then turned in an
entirely different direction, and the Prince resumed his powerful
popular position. Yet his weighty influence, as we have said, was not
fully made known until recently. We have seen but one acknowledgment of
the service of the well-informed and far-seeing writer in the _Leader_,
and to this was not attached his name. We therefore add, in justice to
the memory of a man of rare talent, and the right spirit of
independence, which is the best characteristic of a public journalist,
that the writer in question was the late Mr. E. M. Whitty, who reprinted
the above in _The Governing Classes of Great Britain_.
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