The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1937. LAYING DOWN THE BURDEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 120, 22 May 1937, Page 8

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

SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1937. LAYING DOWN THE BURDEN.

*fc# <*»«se that lacks aesietamee, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good thiU we com do.

The House of Commons will soon—perhaps next week—meet for the last time with Mr. Baldwin as Prime Minister. The sense of loss which will then be &iven eloquent expression will not be confined, to the British Parliament, or to Britain; it will be felt in the Dominions, too. Theoretically the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is but the head of one of His Majesty's Governments; in practice, so much more responsibility rests upon him than upon any other that he is virtually the leader of the whole Commonwealth. With two fairly short interruptions Mr. Baldwin has been the effective leader for many years. They have been troubled years, in which bad leadership, especially rash leadership, might easily have' precipitated disastrous conflicts at home or abroad. At some periods in those years it has seemed that leadership was lacking, but at critical times —and everyone will have in inuid, particularly, the events of last December—Mr. Baldwin has been the leader not merely of the Government, but of the nation and the Commonwealth. He has led by force of character, and it is indicative of

his character that he is ending his active career with the goodwill of everyone. Mr. AsquLth, when he was Prime Minister, once spoke of the "intolerable burdens" of his office, and Mr. Baldwin, who heard him, recently confessed that then he thought it an exaggeratio'n, but he had since learned that it was not. "The result of year after year of this responsibility is to sap the vitality of the strongest. ... I am quite clear in my own mind that while I believe my judgment to be as good—if it has been good—as it has ever been, I am conscious that the vitality is to a certain extent sapped, and that one needs more rest and one gets more tired. . . . Far better to go when people may still think of you as not incompetent to do your work than to stay until, perhaps, they know before you do that you are becoming incompetent." Many a man, in politics and in other spheres of life, would be greater if he realised the wisdom of this view, or, knowing it, recognised that'it applied to himself. Mr. Baldwin is not yet 70, and England has had many Prime Ministers older than that. Another man might have thought that for patriotic reasons he should stay; it is for patriotic reasons that Mr. Baldwin has decided to go. "What right," he said at Worcester last month, "has one to go on with the risk that one may get much more tired and really impair the Government of which one is the head?" This view lis characteristic of the man, and it will be honoured by all, including the "ordinary" men and women to whom Mr. Baldwin has long made a strong and non-party appeal. It is also characteristic of the man that he made his own decision, and would have no one (hasten it.

j The retiring leader has given a clear idea of- his thoughts concerning the future of his j country. He sees a danger that, impelled by 'examples in Europe, people may "confuse acceleration with civilisation." Abroad, both in Communist and Fascist countries, there has jbeen perfected machinery for mass impression land mass consciousness. Changes have been and can be brought about swiftly, and the swiftness of them evokes in some minds [admiration and a desire to imitate. But, Mr. Baldwin reflects, changes cannot be made swiftly except by force. "And any man who brings about changes in any country by force cannot maintain himself and the changes he has effected except by a continuation of force, I because he knows that it is force alone that can dethrone him; and you at once move into another region and another atmosphere from that in which all our constitutional struggles took place." Changes have taken place in England under Mr. Baldwin's leadership, changes so great that they have shocked the more conservative of his followers, but they have been accomplished constitutionally and and have left no hatred in their train. England may well hope and resolve at this time that the manner of future change shall be no different.