The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1937. THE CORONATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 8

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1937. THE CORONATION.

.F»r t Jm? cause that lacks assistwnee, For the wrong that needs resistance. For the future in the distance, And the good thui toe owr> do.

Next Wednesday some seven thousand persons in Westminster Abbey will witness the Crowning of a British Monarch and his Consort. Outside the Abbey millions of people will be assembled in the streets, waiting to acclaim the newly-crowned King and Queen as they pass. Beyond Bonclon, and beyond England, in many countries of the world, at varying times of the clay and night, other British people and millions not British I will listen to the descriptions of the scene, and even hear part of the ceremony itself. It will be a magnificent spectacle, and a rare one, for in Britain there has been no Coronation for 26 years, and Kings are now fewer in the world. The publicity given the preparations for the Coronation and the rehearsals of the processions and of the Abbey ceremony tends to focus attention on the Coronation as a spectacle. But the stately ceremony and the 'glittering procession are not all, and they are not for nothing. "The pomp and ceremonial, the regalia and all the wonder of the spectacle, stand for things unseen."

I Tne King will be crowned as "His Most Excellent Majesty George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland, and of the British Dominions 3eyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India." He will be the first king in British history to be crowned imperially, King of Great Britain and also of live autonomous young nations. His Cabinet in Whitehall has no constitutional voice in the ruling of the Dominions. It is the Cabinet for the United Kingdom and the dependent Empire; but he, as King, will reign over all these, and over Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand as well. The Crown he will wear will have for him a significance that it had for none of his ancestors. It has become, in the words of the Statute of Westminster, "the I symbol of the frqe association of the members | of the British Commonwealth of Nations . . . " I which are united by a common allegiance to it.

If this new feature of the Coronation ceremony is perhaps the most interesting to people in the Dominions, it is the only one that is new. In all its main features, the Archbishop of Canterbury has written, the Coronation service has been maintained unchanged since the ninth century. "The significance of the ceremony is that the King does not crown himself. His crown is brought from God's Altar and put upon his head by the Archbishop, in token that his kingship is a solemn trust committed to him by Almighty God." He is crowned with the same rites as those with which his predecessors have been crowned for more than a thousand years. Thus there is proclaimed the stability and continuity of one of the oldest monarchies remaining in the world. Few other institutions [have such a record of continuity, fewer still (have such stability.

The people in this Dominion and in others may well reflect at this time upon their good fortune in being citizens of the great Commonwealth whose titular head is about to be crowned. Their countries are free, they govern themselves. This also can be said of the smaller democracies of Europe, but of them it is true to say that they live with an increasing feeling of insecurity. The hope of a collective security system, which they so strongly supported, has faded. They feel the need of a protector, but cannot find one without surrendering the reality, if not the forms, of their independence. The younger British democracies, by contrast, have a protector who exacts no price; they have their own collective security system. The keystone of the structure is the Monarch.