For Country, Not Queen

A member of the British Foreign Office once blamed the relative lack of appeal of this country's public service on the fact that Americans can hold no titles of nobility. "An English civil servant will slave for forty years," he said, "just so he may someday be tapped on the head by his Sovereign." This ingrained avoidance of the trappings of royalty may also explain why Americans whose memories do not reach back to 1936 are somewhat bewildered at the British Commonwealth's preoccupation with the Coronation. The island that has lived so long on austerity, boiled, seems ready to burst. People in countries whose affiliations with Britain are, at best lackadaisical have decorated their streets in honor of an event thousands of miles away concerning a lady whom they probably will never see.

The nearest thing in America is an Inauguration of a president, but even that event is too partisan and frequent to evoke the same fever. Rather the coronation resembles what would happen if Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson were to come alive, and at an appointed hour drive down Fifth Avenue before the massed memberships of the DAR, SAR and American Legion. But America, lacking a living human being to sum up its history, can only grope at understanding what the Coronation means to the Commonwealth.

The Coronation does not exist to glorify Elizabeth. For her, it will be a grueling six hours, borne under robes and diamonds equal in weight to a full infantry pack. Her role tomorrow will be as hard and pitiless as the role of Queen itself, but Elizabeth will undoubtedly bear it with her usual quict grace.

Nor is the Coronation an ingenious device for political unification of the British Commonwealth. There will be no suspension of apartheid in South Africa, no more love of Britain in India. A week from now, liberals and conservatives will be fighting each other again in the Commonwealth's parliaments.

Rather, the Coronation, like the Crown and Commonwealth themselves, exists for the people who will be watching it. By resurrecting the pageantry of the days when Britons lived for the Crown, the Coronation will renew their pride in the democratic revolution that has been worked inside the forms of monarchy. The delerious celebration will refresh peoples whose economic and cultural capacities have either passed their peak or not yet reached it.

The Queen's subjects have been America's allies for over a decade. So even if they cannot fully understand the bustle over the Coronation, Americans can still enjoy it vicariously, as one regards the family marriage of a close friend. When the radio and papers are full of royalty tomorrow, it will not be at all un-American to join six hundred million others and say, "God save the Queen," with respect and admiration.