was submitted on behalf of the Labour Party to the Civil List Committee was an ingenious composition which it is not easy to criticise in detail. In so far as it is to be condemned it is on account of the Party's conception or how the monarchy is to be used by the State. For though there is nothing republican in the language of the amendment there lies behind it a very definite intention of using the King as a mere ceremonial figurehead. The insistence on the widening of his personal contacts and the dropping of some of the more ornate and expensive ceremonial is not evidence of the contrary but simply of another conception of the duties of the figurehead -a conception framed somewhat on the American picture of the. hail-fellow-well-met hand-shaking President.
But the President of the U.S.A., for all his routine hand-shaking, wields real and great political powers. and asserts his personal influence in ways which the Labour Party would not tolerate for a moment in the King. The -Party's complete unanimity with the Government in the matter of the abdication is proof enough of this. It is, unfortunately. proof also that the Government is of one mind with the Labour Party.