excellence consists in never doing any act of government except under the guidance of her Ministers. The queens regnant or consort, before our monarchy became constitutional, who may be said to have wielded power, are the Empress-Queen Matilda, Eleanor, the wife of Henry II., Isabella, the wife of Edward II., Margaret of Anjou, Mary, Elizabeth, and Henrietta Maria. Not much can be made of this list when it is considered that both Margaret of Anjou and Henrietta Maria were, by their temper, principal causes of civil wars, and that the statesmanship of Elizabeth has totally collapsed between Mr. Froude's first volume and his last, while her feminine relations with Leicester and other favourites have contracted a much more ominous complexion in a political as well as in a moral point of view. On the other hand, it is probable that Eleanor, the wife of Edward I., and certain that Caroline, the wife of George II., rendered, in a womanly way, high services to the State. So did Queen Philippa when by her womanly intercession, she saved her husband from the disgrace of putting to death the Burghers of Calais; had she been the sovereign she might herself have lost her gentleness like Elizabeth, who on one occasion desired that the object of her wrath might be put to death with more cruel and protracted tortures. Mr. Mill says, from his experience at the India Office, that the queens in India are better than the kings. But the reason is obvious. British protection has suspended the operation of the rude checks on the vices of Indian despots, and a woman brought up in the zenana, though she cannot possibly be a good ruler, may well be better than a hog or a tiger.
Neither the cases of queens, however, nor those of female regents of the Netherlands, to which Mr. Mill gives so strange a turn (as though Charles V. and Philip II. had preferred females on account of their ability to male members of the house), are in point. They all belong to the hereditary system, under which these ladies were called to power by birth or appointment, and surrounded by councillors from whose policy it is scarcely possible to distinguish that of the sovereign. Under the elective system women would have
