ADJOURNMENT OF THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENT.

Evening Post, Volume LXXI, Issue 141, 15 June 1906, Page 5

ADJOURNMENT OF THE FEDERAL PARLIAMENT.

A NEWSPAPER'S CRITICISM. MELBOURNE, 14th June. The Age, in a leading article, says that in the crisis of the Boer war, Mr. Seddon was the inspiration of Australian action. The paper severely deals with the adjournment of Parliament as a mark of respect, and says it seems a pitiful anachronism that the death of such a man as this, whose life was given up to the service of the public, should have been made the occasion of another of those unmeaning Parliamentary adjournments, that is always seized upon with avidity as a waste of time. "Parliamentary . adjournment as a mark of respect is," says the Age, "a senseless proceeding, and means nothing more of public duty than a desire to pursue private amusement. And they dignify this proceeding by courtesy of the title of 'respect for the dead.' In the case of some men whose lives are a prolonged act of idleness, running away from duty would be in keeping, however little it may have in it of respect. But to follow tnat Course in th« cast oi Mr. Seddon, whose whole life was dedicated to sedulous performance, was a sorry affair." "Yet the House," adds the paper, "gave up an entire sitting to an empty form of the very kind that Mr. Seddon would have despised. If Parliament had voted money for the purposes of a statue or scholarship, or any other means of linking the name of Mr. Seddon with' the nation's sense of honour and gratitude, it would have discharged a duty to a great Australasian Liberal, but to imagine that it did any honour to Mr. Seddon by abstaining from the performance of its duty is about the severest satire it could pnss upon his memory." ;