( it is curious to recall that it is not very long since the main complaint of the critics of the monarchy was that it exercised too much hidden authority : this was certainly the complaint made , until recently , of George 5&apos;s behaviour during the constitutional crisis of 1931 . ) the fact is that the evidence available to us makes it clear that the sovereign still exercises considerable power , even if this power commonly takes the form only of personal influence , is an expression only of the constitutional right to be consulted , to advise , and to warn . there are several examples of the exercise of this personal influence in Sir Harold Nicolson &apos;s life of King George 5 , and the little evidence available to us about the use of his position of influence by King George 6 suggests that tradition and habit - to say nothing of hereditary streaks of character - combine strongly to ensure that the right to advise and to warn is not something which either the sovereign or his Ministers take lightly . if anything , the present reign is likely to see a steady increase in the influence of the sovereign . Mr Muggeridge bashfully claims that he has no knowledge of the present members of the royal family . but I am sure that he does know that the present Queen is reputed to be a very strong-willed young woman , able and ready to make her views known and heeded , that she has , at worst , a strong streak of Hanoverian pig-headedness , and , at best , an unusual strength of character and clarity of purpose . this is of no little importance : even Lytton Strachey was , in the end , no match for the character of Queen Victoria , and this may well be the reason why Mr Muggeridge chooses to ignore the known character of her great-great-granddaughter . of no less importance is the fact that the present Queen is likely to reign for a very long time : longer , perhaps , even than Queen Victoria . the length of Queen Victoria &apos;s reign , her accumulated experience , her growing personal ascendancy over Ministers who naturally stood in awe of so formidable an historical figure , her ascendancy even over the heads of foreign powers , even when they were not her own children or grandchildren : all these were an important reason for the exceptional influence which she came to exercise . there seems every possibility that the present Queen will increasingly come to occupy something of the same position . however much the facts of power may change , the influence of an experienced and knowing old woman , who had been at the head of her state for fifty years while heads of the U.S.A or the U.S.S.R or even the Chinese republic had come and gone , could not count for nothing - even in the world which Mr Muggeridge sometimes fearfully imagines will exist in 2002 . how do we expect this exceptional position of influence , which confers real personal power , to be used ? much , and the answer , again , is best given in personal terms , as George 5 interpreted his duties and , so far as we know , George 6 also . George 5 had a strict and unerring understanding of the important conventions of the constitution : this proved to be of untold value during the crisis of January , 1924 , when he resisted the most powerful pressures which were put on him to keep the labour party out of office . to his instinctive behaviour on that occasion we can , in part , attribute the development of the labour party within the parliamentary system instead of outside it , at a time when left-wing movements throughout Europe became &amp;eacute;migr&amp;eacute; groups within their own countries . holding the ring - for this is what such conduct is - is not confined to strict constitutional questions . in Sir Harold Nicolson &apos;s biography , there are many examples of George 5&apos;s anxiety that the dominant party or even interest should not , so far as it was within his power to influence decisions , ride roughshod over the rights of any of his people . twice during the general strike , for example , he spontaneously and effectively intervened to prevent the more extreme elements in the conservative government from unjustly or cruelly treating the strikers . interventions of this kind can not be ignored , and neither can their importance . it is no small thing , in an age of strong party government , to have excesses of party spirit rebuked by one to whom Ministers are constitutionally bound to listen ; and that they do listen is apparent from all that we know of the labour governments of 1945-51 , and the little that we know of the history of the conservative governments which have held office since then . it is apt to make people uncomfortable to-day to talk of duty , especially of duty in high places . but no one can read the biographies of George 5 and George 6 , which are not sycophantic , without realising that it was a simple , almost nai&quot;ve , conception of their duty to their subjects , all their subjects , for it affected even George 5&apos;s attitude to the Indian question , which inspired most of their actions , and certainly their actions at all critical moments . I state this as a cold fact , which no one who is not blinded by preconception can fail to recognise in the available evidence . it is equally apparent , from the available evidence that the very simplicity of this conception of duty has normally had , and can not fail normally to have , a softening and civilising influence on those engaged in the embittering struggle for power . there are ideas and conceptions , as Professor Butterfield has reminded us , which are none the less real merely because it is only thinking which has made them so . Marc Bloch &apos;s account of the collapse of France in 1940 is , for the comparisons it affords , not irrelevant to the point I am trying to make . he there accuses the rulers and seducers of the French people before 1940 of showing complete ignorance of the high nobility which lies unexpressed in the hearts of a people which , like ours , has behind it a long history of political action . it is not a sentimental , but a precise point which he makes : it is the length of a people &apos;s political tradition to which he draws our attention , and the failure of the inherent nobility of the French political tradition to find worthy expression before and during 1940 . a similar nobility , inherent in the British political tradition , did find expression in 1940 . it is a foolhardy man , surely , who believes that the contrast had nothing to do with the expression of the tradition through , not only the monarchy as an institution , but also the personal characters and examples set by George 5 and George 6 . the ingraining of this tradition in the British royal family - and I can not see how it could more surely be accomplished than by the passing on of a tradition within a family - seems to me of real value to the country . it is for this reason that most of the sentimental talk about the education of a modern sovereign is so alarmingly irrelevant . day by day , week by week , year by year , the Queen is invited , by her self-appointed advisers , to send her eldest child to a state school , to bring him up like other children : advice which may be relevant to the education of a citizen , but not to the education of a constitutional sovereign . there seems to be little doubt that the inculcation of the habits of mind and behaviour of a constitutional sovereign has been successfully achieved in the cases of George 5 , George 6 , and the present Queen . I see no reason why we should be prepared to barter the prospect of a first-class sovereign for the certainty of yet another second-class citizen . it seems a mean exchange . it is curious that Mr Muggeridge , who is rightly anxious that people should adapt themselves to the realities of their changed positions , does not understand the role of the monarchy in helping to make the uncomfortable facts of life acceptable . it is easy to laugh at the sight of the labour Ministers of 1924 , attired , a little ridiculously , in court dress . but , except to a few irreconcilables of the left , the pomp and the display were a small price to pay for the visible evidence that the sovereign , the known repository of the nation &apos;s political experience , had accepted the labour party as his advisers , and had accepted them in the same manner and with the same marks of respect , given and received , as the representatives of either of the two established , middle-class , parties . nor do I understand how Mr Muggeridge , and those who argue like him , can deny the value of the monarchy in making even more difficult changes , not only popularly acceptable , but acceptable even to those most likely not to be reconciled to them . the transference of power in British territories since 1945 has been made considerably easier by the presence and actions , even by the courtesy , of the two reigning monarchs . again , one may smile at the speed with which Mr Nehru or even Archbishop Makarios is transformed from being one of her majesty &apos;s guests-in-prison into one of her majesty &apos;s guests at Buckingham Palace . but he seems to me someone ill-qualified to observe or comment on public affairs who denies the importance of such things . those pictures of the Queen and her Ministers , which are reproduced on the back page of the Times at every commonwealth conference , are worth contemplating . one may , like Mr Muggeridge , sometimes wryly observe that the number of Prime Ministers seems to increase in direct proportion as the number of territories directly subject to her majesty declines . but in the end , one must , if one is not jaundiced , admit that they are a notable tribute to the capacity of the British for accepting inevitable change . the acceptance of reality in Algeria might have been considerably easier for the colons and the army , if there had been the symbol of an accepted sovereign to emphasise the continuity which exists in all established societies in spite of actual change . it becomes less necessary to cry Algerie Fran&amp;ccedil;aise , or something like it , when the fiction of the headship of the commonwealth makes visible the abiding connections which unite one society to another . the symbolic meaning of the monarchy is the most important and at the same time the most difficult and confusing of all its many aspects . what does the monarchy mean to those who cherish it ? this question must be answered with more than a little care for other people &apos;s needs and feelings . it may well be that the monarchy is less necessary to the articulate than the inarticulate , to Mr Muggeridge than Mrs Mop . but I am not so sure of this . as I have said , Mr Muggeridge seems to me to betray just as foolish an obsession with the monarchy as the most bedazzled reader of woman and woman &apos;s own . the value of the monarchy to me , personally , seems to me to be of much the same order as its value to those less inclined to examine their own attitudes and their own motives . we smile at the court circular ; but remember how many people read the court circular ! says Bagehot in one of his more offensively , intellectually arrogant sentences . its use is not in what it says , but in those to whom it speaks . I do not deny that the monarchy speaks directly and intelligibly to me . if we are to believe Mr Muggeridge , the monarchy symbolises obsequiousness ; sycophancy ; snobbishness ; class-consciousness ; social mountaineering ; dreamland ; earthly pretensions ; and circuses . it is obvious that all of these are commingled in the popular conception of the monarchy , but I find this neither surprising nor , in itself , alarming . obsequiousness , sycophancy , snobbishness , and the like , seem to me , unhappily , to be inevitable components of all human societies - I am not sure they are not their lubrication ; an oily mixture , I agree - and I object to them only when they corrupt or seriously interfere with the legitimate exercise of real power . 