The Life of King Henry the Eight • Paragraph 626
Stage 1 of 6

Read it through once

The first year's reign of a Sovereign must always be important, and when that Sovereign rules over a third of the earth's surface and a quarter of its population, it is more than usually so. King Edward VII., when he came to the Throne, found himself the first of Mohammedan rulers, with more Moslem subjects than the Sultan of Turkey; the first of Brahmin and Parsee Sovereigns; the head of various Confucian colonies and the possessor of the most sacred of Buddhist shrines; the ruler of Christian sects and idolatries of every conceivable kind and variety. Almost every race in the world was included in his Empire--English, Scotch and Irish everywhere, French in the Channel Islands and in Canada, Italians and Greeks in Malta, Arab, Coptic and Turkish subjects in Egypt, Negroes of all descriptions in the Soudan and elsewhere, subjects of infinitely varied Asiatic types in India, Chinese in Hong-Kong and Wei-Hai-Wei, Malays in Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, Polynesians in the Pacific, Red Indians in Canada and Maoris in New Zealand, Dutch, Zulus, Basutos and French Huguenots in South Africa, Eskimos in Northern Canada. The complicated issues involved in such a Government as that of the British Empire, with its curiously non-centralized system, were certainly sufficient to make a Sovereign inheriting the position, the opportunities, and much of the capacity of Queen Victoria, feel that he had, indeed, assumed heavy responsibilities.