Manawatu Evening Standard. MONDAY, JULY 20, 1925. THE IMPERIAL SPIRIT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 193, 20 July 1925, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. MONDAY, JULY 20, 1925. THE IMPERIAL SPIRIT.

The Prune Minister struck the right note in his address at the New Zealand Club luncheon in Wellington in emphasising the need tor a strong spirit of Imperialism, and in ill's appeal to all classes to play their part in upholding the fair name and high tame New Zealand lias won lor itself, during the last 12 years more particularly. All our leading statesmen have been great Imperialists, from Sir George Grey down to the late Mr Massey, who is likely to pass down into history as the greatest of them all, because he lived in such spacious times when the opportunities for service on behalf of the Umpire and its peoples were so abundant, and he was so quick to rise to the occasion. Judged by his utterances and actions Mr Coates is likely to prove a worthy successor to the great statesmen who have preceded him in the office he now holds. In the two or three pronouncements he has already made concerning the policy he hopes to see carried out during his term of office, Mr Coates has emphasised the importance of the Imperial connection, reminding us that “New Zealand is part of a great Empire in which the life and conditions of all are very closely ’in'led.” Since the Armistice 'acre has been a marked change in the attitude of certain of the Dominions' ' towards the Mother Country in regard to foreign relationships, the Dominions, while demanding' a consultative voice on such matters, declining to be bound by any actual decisions arrived at by the Home Government. This was more particularly the case in regard to the security pact to which the British Foreign Uilice stood committed. The Dominions had been consulted upon the matter by Mr Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and one of Mr Coates’s first actions, on assuming office as Prime Minister, was to cable to the Imperial Government to say that “whatever arrangements the Imperial Government may make for the purpose of securing peace, New Zealand is behind :hem to a man.” In that reply we believe the great majority of New Zealanders will concur, for at this -distance from Europe we cannot pretend to have the same knowledge of those under-cur-rents in the life of the nations which lead to intrigues and rivalries tending towards hostile action. Canada was somewhat disgruntled over the decisions of the Lausanne Conference and does not icar to have taken kindly to the so that Mr Coates’s action has probably proved the more

grateful to the British Foreign Secretary, by its whole hearted character. Mr Coates pointed out at the luncheon referred to that there were two schools of thought appealing to the people to-day—> “the Constitutional one, for which he felt everyone in New Zealand stood, with the Sovereign as the Imperial arch,” and “the other sort of Imperialism which lie did not consider to be Imperialism at all.”- The people advocating the latter (by which' it may be assumed he meant those who advocated what is termed “Internationalism”) were, Mr Coates said, all “anti-Constitutionalists.” It. is one of the peculiarities of the Labour mentality, as exhibited in those who profess to be its leaders, that they imagine they can “constitutionally” advocate and seek the overthrow of the constitution they are sworn to uphold when they take the oath of allegiance required of them before they can take their seats in Parliament. The Imperialistic spirit is so far lacking in their words and actions that they do not hesitate to decry British institutions, British law, the Imperial connection, and any British Government other than the Labour Government of last year. Mr Ramsay MacDonald has a good .many political sins to answer for, chief among them being his willingness to advance a loan to the country which was, and still is, carrying on an insidious and deadly campaign against Great Britain with the object of undermining and destroying the existing social order, while he was professedly unable to find a single penny for the housing of the people. Speaking in the House of Representatives the other day, one of the Labour members sneeringly rexerred to the refusal of Mr Ba Idwin’s Government to confirm the loan, although (as he put it) they were ready enough to expend the money upon the Singapore base, which he averred was intended as a menace to Japan. To such men the Imperial connection appears to be anathema; love of country, pride of race, patriotism, and the cultivation of the national spirit, are, in their eyes, equally undesirable and, as far as they dare carry their propaganda against the existing social order, they discourage these and other traifs in the character of our young people, and seek to substitute their crazy Marxian ideas of government for the sound com-mon-sense of those democratic principles which have made British peoples, governed by British law, the freest of all nations, and the most ..-prosperous. We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on- tlie fact that the greatest of our Imperialists, who is no longer with us, has been succeeded by another Imperialist who, having himself served on the battlefields of Europe in the cause of Empire, recognises alike the necessity of maintaining a united Empire, and the closest possible relationships with the Mother Country and the sister Dominions and States of Empire.