Abstract
THEIR MAJESTIES were greeted on their return to England on June 22 and again on their drive to, and from, the Guildhall in the City of London on the following day with enthusiasm which needed no pageantry, no ceremonial, to quicken its sense of the significance of the events of the brief period which have elapsed since the King and Queen sailed for Canada on May 6. King George and his Consort were being hailed as conquerors—conquerors of a continent—no less certainly than were those of their predecessors, who in days gone by had passed through Temple Bar to celebrate a victory in the capital city. In this enthusiastic, but intimate, greeting of King and Queen there was a deep and strong undercurrent of loyal gratitude to them that in their journey from one end to the other of the vast Dominion of Canada, and no less in their visit to its great neighbour, the United States of America, their Majesties had so borne themselves that personal devotion to those wearing the Crown and a spirit of kindly hospitality to honoured guests had been transmuted to a deeper consciousness of the common devotion of all, President and citizen, Sovereign and subject alike, to the ideals of liberty and justice which transcend birth, creed and the barriers of national division in a supremo loyalty to the cause of humanity. In all the ceremonies and incidents of the Royal tour which, as His Majesty said at the Guildhall with a homely but happy touch of common interests, have been made “familiar . . . through the daily press, the news reels, and the Broadcasting Corporations”, none was so deeply charged with emotion, none so moving to those gifted with historical imagination, as the simple scene in which King George laid a wreath upon the tomb of George Washington. This act of homage epitomizes as a symbol a memorable episode in the history of the British Commonwealth of Nations no less surely than His Majesty's impression of his experience, summed up in the memorable words “the strength of human feeling is still the most potent of all the forces affecting world affairs”.
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The Royal Visit to America. Nature 144, 15 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144015a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144015a0