LOYALTY

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 842, 14 June 1910, Page 4

LOYALTY

Its grateful remembrance of his services to the cause of national defence has inclined the public to listen with respect to ' Mr. M'Nab's opinions. on questions outside the boundaries of local politics. We are therefore very sorry to see that in giving his impressions of England ho has revived an odious heresy that wo had hoped had had its little day. Ho had heard, before lie went Home, so he says, ''about the disloyalty of some (if the colonics," but he now thinks that one gets "the finest type of loyalty" in J\ T ow Zealand, and the next best sort in.Australia. "I used to tell them at Home," he adds, "that a New Zealander's loyalty was a religion compared with an Englishman's loyalty," and he mentions the horror of a certain Canadian lady when a lecture at the Royal Colonial Institute ended without the audience rising to sing tho National Anthem. Mr. 'M'Nab, if cross-examined on this point, might reveal himself as a firm believer, with Tennyson, that in the time of crisis the slow and heavy Englishman would rise to as great a height .as his romantic cousins oversea. But ho docs not make this clear: he leaves his fellow colonials to believe that as Imperialists they are infinitely finer than the stock from which they have sprung. That this suggestion, which we confidently believe to be founded in error, is unfair to England is not a very important matter. What is important is that it is not a suggestion that can be made to a colonial public without doing harm to that public. Our public men are unfortunately too ready to assure us that New Zealand is "the most Imperialistic" part of the Empire, and to prove it by talking in the usual manner about our devotion to the Empire, and our anxiety to rally to the aid of the Motherland. Some, of our. politicians still believe it is necessary to refer at every opportunity to the loyalty of New Zealand, and this although most people must .long ago have grown weary of these protestations. Nobody'in the world doubts New Zealand's loyalty to the Throne and to the Empire: the excessive insistence upon it does not indicate insincerity, but only bad taste. .

As proof of loyalty to the Throne and the Empire the adoption of the compulsory training principle is worth all the'loyal speeches that have ever been made in this country. We do not think it will be a bad thing if the Act of last year comes to be held as absolving our public men from the obligation to bore us with those loyal and Imperial platitudes which wo all endorse but which we would he the better for hearing much less frequently than we do. The growth of a decent reticence in these matters, of a measure of continence in Imperialist talk, is not likely to bo helped by assurances that "a New Zcalandcr's loyalty is a religion compared with an Englishman's loyalty." If the Englishman does now and then let a lecture end without rising to sing the National Anthem, it is at least possible that Ilia stillness is the stillness of deep waters. New Zealanclers can be paid no higher compliment, as a matter of fact, than that they are as devoted to the Throne as their older kinsmen. As to loyalty to the Empire, there arc certainly some disagreements on special points between good' Englishmen. Those who really dislike the conception of Empire, though loud, are not numerous. But not the worst friends of the Empire are those Englishmen who dislike tho grosser excesses of the Imperialist spirit. At the present time the Empire is of less immediate importance to England than it is to England's dependencies. England could for a long time thrive as an island Kingdom: tho Empire could not live unattached to the Mother Country. Any long view will of course show that in future years the burden of dependence will not bo so one-sided, and in spite of.Me. M'Nab we believe that the feolftag of Britain rests on that long view. To imply, therefore, that Britain is narrow and unimaginative, is, as we have said, unfair and unreasonable; and it is very injurious also to the cause of right thinking in a country that has been brought very near to the belief that, the Empire can be best served by lavishness in Imperial rhetoric and zeal in singing'loyal songs and ' anthems. When Mr. Chamberlain made his famous appeal for Imperial thinking he did not mean mere Imperial talking. What .New Zealand most requires is plenty of cold-blooded advice to serve the Empire, not by talk or wholly by thought, but mainly by action. ,