THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 9, 1886.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7790, 9 November 1886, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 9, 1886.

Another return of the natal day of the heir to the British Grown, and holiday will be kept as a national fete in the old land and in the multitude of her trans-marine possessions. It is a proud thing to bo heir to a monarchy which is 1100 years old, and a proud thing to be heir to the Grown of an Empire which stretches its arms through every sea, and now holds dominion in each quarter of the world. And if the Prince may well be proud, it is high honour also to be the citizen of such a State. History repeats itself— Givis J&omanus Sum! What marvellous changes have come about in Queen Victoria's Empire since she ascended the Throne —what changes in the world at large! Events come thick and fast in these latter days. Except in India and in South Africa, England's possessions were not much less extensive forty or fifty years ago than now, but they

have been filling up since then, and that makes the difference. Extraordinary transformations have occurred in Europe. Indeed the Continental map may be said to Ire revolutionised. And while Germany and Italy acquired their national and natural position, and while Turkey is disappearing, and Russia and Austria are rivals for the division of Eastern Europe, England has reproduced herself beyond the sea, and Britain is multiplying into many Britains. Fifty years ago where were the great Australasian colonies which are now attracting so much attention? New South Wales was only beginning to find its way to the interior, having been hedged in to a narrow strip of coast by that long insurmountable mountain barrier, whose precipices are now scaled and the abysses bridged by a railway, which' is one of the most wonderful of the wonderful exploits of cotemporary engineering. Then a hamlet of a few shanties, only a few weeks put up, represented what has grown to be the city of Melbourne with 360,000 inhabitants. Similarly faint indications of future progress marked the site of Adelaide. The missionary already penetrated among the warring Maori tribes, and whalers visited the Bay of Islands; an occasional vessel would sometimes trade at Moreton Bay; but there was yet no colony of Victoria, no colony of New Zealand, no Queensland. Extraordinary also is the transformation exhibited by our North-American possessions. An unpretentious cluster of colonies doing some trade in timber and fish, and the wild territories of the Hudson's Bay Company, valued only as a hunting ground for furs, have become the Canadian Dominion, certain to be in a few years a powerful sister of the parent State. Under the magic of selfmanagement, conceded by wise statesmanship in Westminster, two great works have mainly contributed to the change. The first was the turning to account the unrivalled opportunities for inland navigation presented by the chain of the Great Lakes as a continuation of the St. Lawrence, and the second was the Great Trunk Railway, since extended into the Transcontinental Railway, iust completed, which will be an immense advantage to the Empire at large, as well as to the Canadas. By the route thus provided troops can be transferred in forty days from Liverpool to Calcutta, the present route by Suez occupying thirty days. When we consider that the Suez way might any time be interrupted by the accidental sinking of a vessel in the canal —if not by foreign antagonism—we can perceive the advantage of this new route always reliable, because by land running through British territory and by sea traversing no narrow waters.

Yes, the British monarch ruies an empire indeed, rivalled in extent only by the Roman one of old and the Russian in modern times. But 11 King " is the hereditary title of the English Sovereign, and there is naturally a national preference for it. The title of Emperor has ancient associations, not savouring of constitutional rules. Until recent times there were only two Emperors in Europe—the German, who, at a later period, became the Austrian, and the Russian one. It is true that Peter the Great was the first Muscovite Sovereign who formally took the name of Emperor; but his predecessor, Ivan the Terrible, in the 16 th century, meant the same thing when he called himself Ozar—being the first Prince on the Russian throne who did so. The term Czar, like the German one, Kaiser, meant Csesar— the German Emperor and the Russian monarch thereby signifying their claims to represent, respectively, the old Roman Imperators and Caesars of the West and of the East. This circumstance showed the disposition thus early to get hold of Constantinople, but, as matter of fact, it was manifested at a far earlier period than the days of Ivan the Terrible j for there were two Muscovite expeditions against the Byzantine capital, as far back as the ninth and tenth centuries. In our time the imperial title has not, invariably, its old unconstitutional significance. The present Emperors of Germany and Austiia are not absolute princes; and neither could the late French Emperor be called so, although like his opponent, the Minister Bismarck, he carried things pretty much his own way by virtue of a strong will and strong brains, his people in confidence acquiescing. The late Lord Beaconsfield, with his Oriental fancy, liked the Imperial title, believing it would be more impressive in our eastern realm than the simpler Royal one, in which opinion he was doubtless right; and the Queen of England now bears in her Indian dependency the title of Empress.

In England, however, the monarchy will not change its royal style, even though it has come to sway *ne widest empire on the globe. Tne titles of king and queen are too inseparably connected with the national history to be lightly exchanged. From the eighth century, when Egbert was the first monarch of all England, if we look down the long picture , gallery, many as are the dark figures we see, how many are the brilliant also—the illustrious Alfred, the just and pious Canute, down through the grim line of Norman kings, and through the picturesque Flantagenets to the Oourt of the virgin Queen, splendid with its men of genius and romantic adventure, and down to modern times. A poet says that "Time, like fuller's earth, takes out all stains. ,. It is true in degree if only in degree. If the Plantagenets waged between themselves the sanguinary civil -wars of the White Rose and the Bed, they also left behind the memories of Orecy and Agincourt. We forget that Elizabeth had a cruel barbaric strain, like all the Tudors, when we recollect that she was also truly a patriotic and able Sovereign; and her name calls up the names of Shakespeare and Bacon, of Raleigh and Spenser. We would not care for Queen Anne but that her reign was an Augustan age, and that she sent Marlborough to Flanders to win glory for England. George the Third drove the American Plantations |to revolt, and he joined the Continental despots to crush the French revolution; but such recollections were lost sight of when under his eceptre Nelson figured on the sea, and Wellington on the land. Yes, sentiment is a potent thing, and irresistible is the spell of proud national associations.