The Feilding Star. Kiwitea & Oroua Counties Gazette. MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1906. Very Optimistic.

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 138, 10 December 1906, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Kiwitea & Oroua Counties Gazette. MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1906. Very Optimistic.

The gentlemen who have charge of the movement in Wellington for the establishment of a national memorial to the late Premier are about the most unsophisticated mortals it has been our lot to come across, if we are to judge by the manner in whicl they are going on. Their ideas, at any rate, are big enough, but their methods are too subtle for an ordinary mortal to understand. They held a number of meetings, and finally decided that £25,000 was about the sum which should bo raised to carry out the schemes they had in mind. Having decided upon the amount, they took no steps at all to ensure it being raised — that evidently had no place in their calculations. They sent circulars out broadcast to the different local bodies in the colony, asking for opinions as to the form the memorial should take, and, of course, where human beings arc concerned, there >vas a great divergence of opinion, so that the question of deciding upon the best scheme will, we presume, take another decade. When chat stage is reached, the first and most important problem of all, viz., laising the money, will have to be tackled) and we much mistake the majority of tie people, if we are not right in saying that the response will be very disappointing, or, at any rate, not a quarter as much as if the money had been collected directly the subject was mooted. Of course, we are biassed in matters of this sort, for we do not believe any man who has had the true interests of his country at heart would desire that his death fehjould be the occasion of harrying and worrying people — many of whom find it difficult enough to meet their ordinary obligations — to provide money for memorials which are not in any sense fitting reminders of those whose memories they are supposed to perpetuate. A good bust or two of a public man, placed where they can be seen by the multitude, as proof that such a man existed and took his share of the public work of the nation, is more likely to be a suitable and lasting memorial than any of the meretricious and extravagant proposals which make more for the aggrandisement of those living than the remembrance of the one who has passed away. "To live in the hearts of those we love, is not to die," taken in its broadest sense, is worth more to a man than all the monuments in the world.