After the great ceremony of thanksgiving in St Paul's Cathedral the Queen expressed her thanks to her people in the following message:
"I am anxious to express to my people my warm thanks for the kind, and more than kind, reception I met with on going to and returning from Westminster Abbey with all my children and grandchildren.
"The enthusiastic reception I met with then, as well as on those eventful days in London, as well as in Windsor, on the occasion of my Jubilee, has touched me most deeply, and has shown that the labours and anxieties of fifty long years—twenty-two years of which I spent in unclouded happiness, shared with and cheered by my beloved husband, while an equal number were full of sorrows and trial borne without his sheltering arm and wise help—have been appreciated by my people. This feeling and the sense of duty towards my dear country and subjects, who are so inseparably bound up with my life, will encourage me in my task, often a very difficult and arduous one, during the remainder of my life.
"The wonderful order preserved on this occasion, and the good behaviour of the enormous multitudes assembled, merits my highest admiration. That God may protect and abundantly bless my country is my fervent prayer."
And in laying the foundation-stone of the Imperial Institute, she said:
"I concur with you in thinking that the counsel and exertions of my beloved husband initiated a movement which gave increased vigour to commercial activity, and produced marked and lasting improvements in industrial efforts. One indirect result of that movement has been to bring more before the minds of men the vast and varied resources of the Empire over which Providence has willed that I should reign during fifty prosperous years.
"I believe and hope that the Imperial Institute will play a useful part in combining those resources for the common advantage of all my subjects, conducing towards the welding of the colonies, India, and the mother-country, into one harmonious and united community. . . ."
When war was declared in South Africa and the Boer forces invaded Cape Colony and Natal, contingents from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Cape Colony, and Natal joined the British force and fought side by side throughout that long and trying campaign.
In 1897 was celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's reign, and every colony sent a detachment of troops to represent it. At the steps of St Paul's Cathedral the Queen remained to return thanks to God for all the blessings of her reign, and after the magnificent procession had returned she once again sent a message to her people:
"In weal and woe I have ever had the true sympathy of all my people, which has been warmly reciprocated by myself. It has given me unbounded pleasure to see so many of my subjects from all parts of the world assembled here, and to find them joining in the acclamations of loyal devotion to myself, and I wish to thank them all from the depth of my grateful heart."