SEDDON AND KRUGER

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXIX, Issue 139, 16 June 1906, Page 2

SEDDON AND KRUGER

A cable message from Capetown, expressing South Africa's share in the universal sorrow for the Empire's loss, mentioned that some of the English and Dutch papers had ranked Mr Seddon with Mr Rhodes and Mr Kruger. The similarity between the two great Imperialists has already been referred to editorially in these columns, but the parallel drawn between the late Prime Minister of this colony and the last President of the Transvaal Republic has'not yet been touched upon. The name of Paul Kruger is perhaps too closely associated in our minds with the causes and consequences of the late disastrous war to allow of a generous verdict, but we may be permitted a calm and impartial consideration of what the man was from the point of view of the people he loved and served and died for. It is impossible for us to wee him as ho was seen through Dutch eyes, but it is not difficult to discover why the Boers loved him, obeyed him, mourn for him, and honour him, in much the same fashion, and with an intensity as deep, as we loved, followed, grieve for, and extol the majestic personality which lias just fallen behind our horizon. Like Richard Seddon, Paul Kruger was a child of the people; like him, he migrated in his youth to new and unknown lands in search of freedom from what was conceived to be the tyranny of time-encrusted conventions ; like him, he faced the wilderness and fought his way slowly out of obscurity; like him, he enfranchised his fellows, opened the doors of hope and advancement to men of all ranks and no rank, freed the workers from harrassing disabilities, and, like him too, he strove to maintain the supremacy of his race.

In their work both men grew stronger and stronger, and every year, as their power increased, the affection of the people kept pace "with it, until every honour that the people could bestow had been heaped upon them. But like as they were in their beginnings and their aims, their ends were widely dissimilar. Both were the enemies of Ti lists and overgrown financial corporations, but whereas the Paramount Power smiled on flip one, it smote the other. Now that the bitterness of the war is modified, it is open to us to ask what would have happened in

New Zealand if a Combination such as that which invaded the Transvaal had endeavoured to exploit the mines of this country? The supposition is hardly conceivable, it is. true,, but it is conceivable, and what then? We are no longer hoodwinked by specious allusions to the franchise and Boer oppression, and Mr Seddon lived long enough to understand that the true causes of the war are to be traced to the Stock Exchange. We know, too, that the British workmen who were on the Rand in 1899 did not want votes, but justice as between them and the mine-owners, and that though Paul Kiuger, jealous of his. people's rights, refused the one, he secured the other. The mass meeting in Johannesburg a few days ago made this plain. If .the battle had been left to be fought out between the capitalists and Kruger, the result would have been such as Mr Seddon would have achieved had the case been ours—such as he did achieve in cases not greatly differing in character. In thousands of New Zealand homes to-day the people are sorrowing for the loss of a great man and a true friend, and, though years have passed away, in thousands of South African houses there are eyes still wet with grief for Paul Kruger.