This slow weighing of cons in the balance was having a devastating effect upon the minister's nerves; he got upon his feet.
"Does your Grace mean to tell me that this thing is even conceivable?"
"Conceivable? I wish you would state to me, without any fear of offense, the whole body of your objection. I recognize, of course, that the Royal House, in the direct line, has made no such alliance for over two hundred years,—never, in fact, since it ceased to be of pure native extraction. I also admit that for myself as a party politician (if you impose upon me that term) it is inconvenient, destructive even to certain plans which I had formed. But putting myself altogether aside, and allowing that for a precedent we have to go very far back into the past, what real objections have you to urge?"
The Prime Minister was beginning to get thoroughly uncomfortable.
"It is a breach—a fatal breach to my mind," said he, "in that caste distinction which alone makes monarchy possible under modern conditions. I mean no personal disrespect to your Grace: were it a question of my own daughter, I should take the same view. It disturbs a tradition which has worked well and for safety, and has not been broken for hundreds of years. But most destructively of all it threatens that aloofness from all political entanglements—that absolute impartiality between party and party—which to-day constitutes the strength of the Crown."
"I might be quite prepared," said the Archbishop slowly, "in such an event, to withdraw myself from all political action of a party character."
"You cannot so separate yourself from the past," objected the Prime Minister.
"I do not see the difficulty. You yourself, in a long and varied career, have twice changed your party, or deserted it. If that can be done with sincerity, it is equally possible to become of no party at all."
The Prime Minister flushed at this attack on his past record, and struck back—
"Not for an Archbishop," he said, a little sneeringly. "The Church now-a-days has become not merely a part of our political system, but a stereotyped adjunct of party, and a very one-sided one at that."