The Hawera Star. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1925. THE FAITH OF EMPIRE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 12 September 1925, Page 6

The Hawera Star.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1925. THE FAITH OF EMPIRE.

Delivered every evening by 5 o’clock 'n Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Alton, Hurleyvilie, Patea, Wuverley. Mokoia, Whakamara, Obangal, Meremere, Fraser Road, an Ararat*.

The declaration of Imperial faith by the late Lord Milner, which we print on page thirteen to-day, will take rank with Edmund Burke's speech on conciliation with America, and witli the Durham Report on the constitutional position in Canada, as one of the select documents of British race history. The death of Lord Milner in May of this year removed a man who, while lie had much of the autocrat in him and was perhaps never fully known by the British democracy which trusted) him so well, was nevertheless a great Imperial patriot. Scholar, barrister, journalist, statesman, Alfred Milner, from the day he left Oxford, may be said to have lived for the British Empire; and in his death he has.given to that Empire and the world a striking statement of the faith which inspired him throughout. Although his studiousness was never of the cloistered type, he preferred freedom of action to the ties of office; yet his periods of regular service were distinguished by splendid devotion to duty, and in two of his offices—the High Coinmissionership for South Africa during the, most critical days in the experience of tha.t country, and the memorable partnership with Mr Lloyd George in the greater crisis of the World War—Lord Milner made history. His Empire creed is net anything novel. It would be valueless if it were. As The Times put it some weeks ago, it "sets forth what is already, no doubt, the conscious political faith of the best and most thoughtful patriots of the Empire, and the halfconscious or unconscious belief of nearly all its children at home or beyond the seas." But it is an achievement to catch and) to crystallise the spirit of a half-conscious or unconscious belief, and that is what Lord Milner has done in plain, unaffected language, the grandeur of which lies in its simplicity. The distinction that lie draws, at the very outset, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism has not often been stated so clearly, nor with more directness. "A Nationalist is not a, man who necessarilj'' thinks his> nation better than others, or is unwilling to learn from others." So there can be nationalism without jingoism—which is something the cosmopolitans are slow to recognise and slower to admit. But a Nationalist "does think that- his duty is to his own nation,and its development." That is: He is a patriot —one whose patriotism "knows no geographical but only racial limits." It is at this point that Empire citizenship becomes something shadowy and ill-defined. Lord Milner said that it was not the soil of England which was essential to arouse his patriotism, but "the speech, the 'tradition, the spiritual heritage, the principles, the aspirations of the British race." The patriotisms that the world has known hitherto have had more concrete foundations than are offered there. Love of school, of town, of country is the outcome of something tangible, a gradual growth born of long and close association. When for the grey stone turrets of an old school, or the green, smiling fields of a native vale, are substituted traditions and aspirations, the shallow patriot may find his vision failing him. It is then he is in need of the wider horizon of which Lord Milner has written; but there are times when it is no easy matter to widen one’s horizon —there is a trace of the Little Englander in most of us. Yet the British mind, both at Home and overseas, is broadening — reaching out in the wake of Empire, "following the race." Lord Milner recalls the days when separation was regarded as the natural destiny of the Colonies, a view which he finds "no longer anything like so general as it was," and which he prophesies should be altogether extinct in another twenty years. This prophecy applies, of course, to the Motherland; those colonial Britishers who look to separation as their goal are few and far between. And whether twenty, or thirty or forty years are to measure, the period of waiting until all Britons shall be Imperialists, this much is true already: Greater Britain has survived its growing pains. Our forbears won the Empire; we have a share in strengthening its structure; to those who come after us will fall the happy task of leading it on to fulfil its appointed mission in the world. And the common faith inspiring us has been captured and codified for all time in Lord Milner’s memorandum.