The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-02-19 00:00:00

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1876.

THE QUEEN'S NEW TITLE.

One of the most interesting questions pre-
sented by the Government for the consideration
of Parliament is the proposal to give her Majesty
a new title as a result of the cordial reception of
the Prince of Wales in India. The Heir-
Apparent has been welcomed right royally in
the gorgeous land of the East—a land far as the
poles asunder from our gloomy skies and blind-
ing snow-storms. His Royal Highness has been
passing over ground and has traversed, cities
which were the home of civilization more than
two thousand years before Julius Cwsar landed
here, and found the ancient Britons a race of
unmitigated barbarians. Indeed the Hindoo
histories ascribe their origin to a period ages
before the ordinary chronologies. A race of
kings is mentioned as reigning in Hindoostan
2,300 years prior to the Christian era. Towers
and pagodas were pointing to the sky amid the
burning rays of a tropical sun twelve hundred
years anterior to the time whereaf we read in
the Old Testament, when the Philistines were
defeated first by Samuel, afterwards by Saul and
Jonathan ; and their streets were alive with
animation when David, the son of Jesse, armed
with the sling and with the stone, was success-
fully fighting with that terrible Philistine
champion Goliath. Buddhism was introduced
into India centuries before the children of Israel
were carried captive into Babylon and was the
recognized form of religion in the East certainly
five °hundred years before the capture of that
great city by Cyrus the Persian, who, diverting
, the stream of the mighty Euphrates, passed his
army over the dry bed of the river, and surprised
and slew King Belshazzar whilst in the very act
of treating with contempt the sacred vessels of
silver end of gold which had been taken from
the Temple at Jerusalem. It seems singular
that a land which was alive with busy life
centuries previously to a vast number of the
events recorded in the Bible should be to-day
the brightest jewel in the British Crown.
Babylon, with its hanging gardens, its massive
walls, and its hundred gates cf brass, has long
ago fulfilled its destiny and become the very
abomination of desolation; the waters of the
Euphrates no longer wash the splendid quays
and hive the abutments of magnificent bridges;
no more is the hum of u vast population heard
upon its banks; Nineveh, too, has gone, and the
wilderness marked by its site now knows no
sound but the plashing of the lonely waves of
the Tigris, and the shriek of the cormorant and
the bittern; Tyre and Sidon are mere names;
Carthage has passed away; the glory of Athens
is departed; Rome is no longer the mistress of
the world • Macedon and Thebes, Corinth and
I Sparta, Rhodes and Ephesus—all, all have gene.
Yet India, which for wealth and energy could
have competed with most of them, and did in-
deed trade with the Tyriaus and the Egyptians,
I still remains ; its reception of the Prince of
Wales has for months been chronicled over the
I civilized world; and so pleased is the Sovereign
of Great Britain with the greeting accorded to
her eldest son, that she, by the advice of her
responsible Ministers, is about to confer an
honour upon that country by taking a title from
it.
There will be few objections to her Majesty
being described as Queen of England and
Empress of Hindostan. The saying has often
been quoted that the British Sovereign rules
over a dominion upon which the sun never sets;
and this is a case where the interests of truth
have, as is sometimes seen, been sacrificed in
order cleverly to turn a sentence or to round off
a period. It is a matter of geographical
accuracy that when the sun is shining with all
the splendour of meridian upon our own
animated cities, the residents in our Australian
colonies are enjoying the sleep which midnight
brings, and that at the time when the great
luminary of the day is casting the beams of the
morning light over the valleys of England, his
rays are slanting towards the west at Melbourne.
Au American writer has told us, in the eloquent
language of his countrymen, that "her morning
dram-beat, following the sun, and keeping com-
pany with the hours, encircles the earth with
one continuous and unbroken strain of the
martial airs of England." We have been told,
and know full well, that we have belted the earth
with our colonies, dotted its surface with our
fortresses, and anchored our navies in all its
harbours. We send our traders into every port
where the marts of men teem with traffic. A
good third of the populated globe owns our
sway. The Queen owns as her subjects hardy
races which shiver in the climes of the northern
seas and the swarthy savages who pass their
lives upon the shrubless sands of the tropics.
The familiar folds of the Union Jack are flung
out upon the breeze, while passing over the
I trackless highv..ays of every ocean. Our ships
traverse in all directions the hundred and forty
million square miles of water which absorb three.
fourths of the earth's surface. Whether upon
the tempestuous bi:lows of the storm-tossed
Atlantic, the calmer waters of the boundless
Pacific, the bright blue waves of the Indian, or
the ice-baund plains of the Arctic, there is the
saluted by all other nations-as being
that borne by the mistress of the seas. Even
at the very time that the Prince of Wales is
making a triumphal progress through Oriental
cities whose gilded towers and pagodas .reflect
the brilliancy of an unclouded sun, a gallant
baud of British txplerers is making its way
slowly, but we hope surely, towards that undis-
covered region in the immediate neigbourhood
of the North Pole, which for 307 years has been
inaccessible to the most persevering of naviga-
tor 9. They have all good wishes for their suc-
cess, and heartily will they be welcomed on their
return. Let us trust thit the task may be at
length accomplished by British skill, pluck, and
endurance. Meanwhile, her Majesty may well
feel proud of ruling over such a vast and varied
dominion as that which owns to her sway, proud
of the spirit Mill enterprise of the people whom
she governs, atittpi cod uoze especially of India,
the brightef t star ihat shines in our commercial
constellation.