OVERWORKED PRINCE

Evening Star, Issue 17766, 14 September 1921, Page 7

OVERWORKED PRINCE

LIVING ON HIS RESERVES. The Prince is becoming a problem, writes a correspondent in Die ‘ Sunday Chronicle.’ A clean-living, high-spirited youth of twenty-seven, tingling with, physical energy, and all his grandfather's hearty energy, with all his father's sense of duty and all his grandfather's hearty, human relish in life, getting sixty minutes of work of some sort out of every wakiug hour; never resting, responding to evefry challenge—he is in danger of doing far too much. Lord Derby did a real public service when, the, other clay, ho spoke out plainly on this subject. There is a limit to what a man can aland; .but the Princo docs not know it. At his age, perhaps, one ought not to know it. “ I skull be all rightoitor a night’s sleep.” is the way lie waves aside tho advice to take things more easily. And, to look at him, one would cay ho was right. After d racking day spent in the most wearing of all occupations—that of “seeing people” and saying a pleasant word or two to each of them, and being tho centre ox a crowd and tho chief actor in a public ceremony—he goes to bed with a buzzing brain, dazed nerves, limp and exhausted, and the next morning he is up with Iho earliest, clear-eyed, smiling, eager for tho day’s events. “ Never felt fitter,” “As fresh as paint,” is his cheerful answer to the salutations of tho breakfast table, and off he goes to another twelve or fifteen Irours of rush and strain. LIVING ON IMS RESERVES. It will not do. The Prince is spending each day a little more than the vitality sleep brings him. Ho is giving out always a fraction more than lie takes in. He is living, as no man of his.age ought to live, on his reserves. Except occasionally when the burden (as happened once or twice during Lis Imperial tour) grows unbearable, and nature insists on a respite, tho Princo himself is hardly conscious of how incessantly lie is overdoing it. Tho drain on his strength, thought it never stops, is so imperceptible in its immediate effects, his recuperative power is so swift, that, like all other healthy and joyous men, ho docs not stay to reckon the cumulative results. But, at the pace ho is going now, a breakdown is sooner or later inevitable. It is not us though he rested in his hours of leisure, when ho is off public duty. Nearly all his sports are strenuous. As always happens with a man whoso brain and nerves are being overworked, lie finds relief in violent exorcise. Polo, racquets, hunting, point-to-point racing, swimming, and dancing arc good for a man whose vigor in other directions is not already taxed, to the limit. “I SERVE.” And (hero seems to bo no stopping him. An invitation comes to some public function, a. movement makes its appeal for his presence and voice—and the Prince’s instinct is always to accept on the spot. Helping pood causes along, making himself useful strikes him as the obvious way of justifying his office and repaying the boundless affection with which ho is everywhere received.

A man of another temperament, as the calls upon Jus time multiply, would say, “How shall I dodge this?” “Can’t I. get out of that?" That is not fho Prince's way. He wants to respond to every demand. He hates to turn aside from any opportunity of lending a helping hand. He knows it will levy one more toll on his energy; but to refuse, to plead that he be everywhere at once, seems to him like a shirking of duty. Whether it is the Prince himself who is too headstrong, or that those around him do not understand the need for holding him in, 1 do not know.

But the net •result is the earac; that the Prince is taking too much on himself, to the peril of his future health, and that he needs to come midor another sort of discipline. But the. best of all disciplines that could possibly 1,0 imposed upon him would be one of his own choosing—a wife. A wife would insist on his taking proper care of himself. This is a public and national as well as a private and personal matter; otherwise I should not bo discussing it. Tho nation is anxious to see the Prince married, on many grounds. Its anxiety would bo keener still if it realised how much need there is for a protective barrier such ns only a wife can interpose to save the Prince from wearing himself out by the spendthrift recklessness of his devotion to what he thinks tho country expects from him. Bui there is another aspect on this question that needs to be touched on. Tire Prince is an English Prince, the son of an English father and an English mother. I think we all of us learned during the war, even if wc had never understood before, what it meant [or the nation to have an English King and Queen : what a link it was between tho Sovereign and his people; how complete was the identity it established’ of sentiment and instincts; how much would have been lost had not the understanding and the co-operation between tho Court and country been free from any possibility of question.

The King in 1917 look steps to complete the anglicisation of (he Monarchy. Jl, is tho wish of the British people to keep it anglicised. They would far rather that the Prince married a, British girl w’.io war, not of Royal blood than a foreign princess. They believe that the, time has conic when the restrictions which used to hedge round the field of choice should bo done away with, ami that for the Prince to find a brfde within the four corners of the Kingdom and tho Empire would be the, happiest of all possible developments, and the strengthening of every tic that binds the affections and the political instinct of Greer, and ■Greater Britain to the House of Windsor. AN ANNOUNCEMENT DELAYED,

In principle the matter has, I. understand, alreadv been settled. No obstacle, in other words, stands between the. Prince and an unfettered choice. No attempt will be made to force him to sock a wife among the princesses of any Continental ruling home, and the Prince's own feeling on the subject, I believe, are emphatically on the side of freedom and against- tho revival of the pre-war constraints and conventions.

But there the matter halts. Ls it that ho is too busy and preoccupied with other things or simply that chance has not yet brought him in contact with the rightgirl? It certainly cannot bo that there is any lack of willing candidates, or that (he Prince's indecision comes from a dearth of opportunity. Meanwhile the nation and tho Empire, and a few million mothers and daughters in both, wait with such patience as they can muster for the announcement that is still delayed.