Queen Mary.

Wairarapa Age, 22 March 1929, Page 3

Queen Mary.

HER REMARKABLE ROLE. The position of the Queen as one of the Counsellors of State who- are functioning for the King during his illness is remarkable. But not the least remarkable point about it is that the King’s subject<• take it for granted, write's Dr. J. M. Bulloch in a London magazine. Yet such an arrangement would be quite impossible in the United States, or. for that matter, in any republic. Nowhere is (he President’s wife a Presidentesis as an Empreror’s is an Empress or a King’s a Queen. But the position is all the more remarkable in America, for in. the States woman seems to occupy a larger place in the* public eye. She doos not, however, count at the White House or in the high affairs -of State. Some American women arc keenly conscious of the fact snd one of them, Mrs. Kate Trimble Woolsey.- five-and-tweaty years ago, wrote a very resentful book about it undre* thei title of “Republics versus Woman, contrasting the treatment Tccorded to women in aristocracies with that meted out to her in democracies." The contrast. seems a sheer contradiction. And yet Mrs. Woolsey was able to put up a very good case for her contention, which holds good even 5f American women—though not French —have received the vote. She laid it down that Republicanism is “in its ’entire nature and construction a masculine monopoly 1 and must necessarily confer all its pinnacles, authorities, powers, honours, glories, favours, exclusively upon men. It is woman’s implacable foe." A striking illustration comes home to myself, for I happened to bo in New York in 1899, when the town went mad over a triumphal very beautifully arranged, . in honour of Admiral Dewey. The gallant admiral afterwards laid the house which his grateful country had presented to him at the feet of the lady he had just maimed. It was a courtly gesture, but America resented it, and from that day Dewey became a cipher. Then I remember that when

Queen. Maud of Norway, on returning home from Franco in May, 1907, sent a wire thanking President Fallieres and hia wife for their hospitality, every French newspaper commented cm the inclusion of the name of the lady, for never before had a President’s wife been mentioned in any kind of what may be called a State' document. It is true that M. Poincare altered this, for, when President, he appeared at functions accompanied by his wiife-—he once brought her to Buckingham Palace—whereas till that time the President’s consort had been entirely a. private individual. ■ King Edward used to say that England had never been greater than under Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria and Mrs. Woolsey, blazing with a-nige? at the position of her sex, ransacked history for proofs of her contention, citing Deborah, Seminamis, Zenobia—she forgot Cleopatra—lsabel'**. of Castile, Queen Bess, Catherine the Great, Maria Theresa- and Vi< toria. She also declared—perhaps it is stiili true-—that “ the personal or individual face of no American woman has ever been upon the bills, upon the coins ‘of the Republic, but only those of men, men, men." | If she had been better acquainted with our customs -she could have -found other corroborations, one of the most striking of which is usually forgotten by ourselves —namely, that the precedence of a“Tßriti«h peer’s daughters comes immediately after that of their first-born brother and in front of their younger brothers. This is brought out Jn the case of the families ofearls where the -daughters are called “Lady," while the younger sons are only “Hon." Thus it is quite in the order of our mode of life that Queen Mary should hold so high a place ns one of the King’s deputies. Perhaps that is why Americans and especially American women, are so interested in everthing touching King George’s illness.