THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1901.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11629, 17 April 1901, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1901.

The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York are steadily nearing our shores. Almost day by day our cable columns report their progress —and what a truly Imperial progress it is ! The heart of every man of British blood must swell with goodly pride as the story of this Royal tour unfolds itself before him, as he sees and realises how the gates of the sea-ways are held by our wardens, how the uttermost parts of the earth have become, our possession. From the Atlantic isles that cradled our nation, the son of our King journeys towards the Pacific isles that we have made our own, towards strange seas and stranger stars and opposing seasons, but never journeys over alien waters or sets his foot upon an alien shore. The long sea-road he travels by is part of his inheritance; every fort that guards it with frowning guns flies the Imperial flag and thunders a royal salute to greet him ; every station that links together the scattered realm of our people has been forged from British steel and welded by British pluck; most of all, there is no part of it which has not been bettered by our mastery, no province in which the humblest may not fearlessly claim justice from British law. Never has scion of Royal house made before such a wonderful itinerary. We may proudly boast that no other nation could show such a pageant, could pass its Heir-Apparent from hand to hand until he had ringed the world. The Ophir does not coal by the courtesy of the foreigner nor make easy stages by the gracious hospitality of another ruler, however friendly. She will enter Auckland Harbour as completely British as when she sailed ; she will come to us grandly embleming the dignity of the Sea King.

There was once a historic progress in the Crimea, when the great Russian empress was shown by sycophantic courtiers the value of her latest acquisition. Cardboard villages graced the landscape in that inimitable pantomime and plaster towns rose like mushrooms so that the Tsarina might rest nightly amid swarming populations. Imported multitudes made play as merchants and traders, workmen and peasants. It was a triumph of ingenuity and the Tsarina went satisfied away. But for George of Cornwall there is a mightier triumph. He moves though historic scenes. He passes by ancient places, renowned in the world's annals, and sees the fringes of vast provinces that were famous countries when the Saxons were outer barbarians. He comes to ambitious colonies where freemen of the old Northern stock govern themselves after the fashion of their fathers and meet in Parliament to make their own laws at the summons of their King. We read to-day that he is sailing from Colombo to Singapore, from the land of the Buddhists, the legendary Paradise of the Vedas, to the Malay coast where Sinbad the Sailor met such wonders, where Britain found the pirate and made the sea safe for every peaceful trader. We have read of how Gibraltar greeted —that famous Rock which marked to the ancients the entrance to 'he awful and unknown sea, which still keys the Mediterranean, which a handful of British seamen took by storm and which all the might of France and Spain has not been able to rend from our keeping. We have seen him at Malta, that jewel in the crown of every successive Levantine conqueror. We have followed him to Egypt, where the Crescent faintly marks the Red Cross and Edward rules in the name of the Khedive, to the Egypt of Joseph, of Moses and of the Ptolemies, to that helpless Egypt which became as a desert under the hand of the Turk, but which blossoms again like a garden now that English law secures to the ryot the fruits of his labour and has flung down the mighty who ground the faces of the poor. And we have watched him set foot on that arid rock of Aden, yhere the rail) rarely falls, and where man seems altogether outlawed by Nature, but which our nation has made the Gibraltar of Asia and from which our sentries keep sleepless watch find ward over the Eastward road. By the ruins of a score of great empires our British Prince has steered ; over the graves of countless Armadas the Ophir has borne him; he has come from a land the great Pharaohs never heard of, to which the stoutest Persian never dreamed of marching; he has passed the fur-

thest confines of the Roman world, the estremest limits of the regions that Aurungzebe ruled; and still he 'has not yet seen the Southern Cross lift free of the sky line— and beneath the Southern Cross five millions of square miles have been painted red. We are told by the cable that the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and J York have been delighted and imf pressed. This can but, faintly express their- deep emotion at the loyal greeting given them in the famous ports they have entered on their journey hitherward. Yet we are confident that the impressive part of their journey is to come ; that when Singapore is left behind and the Australian continent looms abeam they will begin an experience which they will treasure in their memories as long as they live. For when they cross the Line they will enter a reI gion where all the • conditions of i Eurasia are transformed. Here our | fathers did not find chaotic millions, | on whose behalf an all-wise Provi- ! dence compelled the Briton to become law-giver and master, but almost empty lands that waited for the settler, that were reserved in the fulness of Time as an outlet for the swarming home-seekers of the North. As they traverse our Pacific waters, greeting our Australian neighbours, comiag to our own eager city and its emulous southern sisters, even when they turn their prow to war-swept Africa, when they voyage northward again to loyal Canada, they will see the broad foundations upon which Greater Britain is really being built. They will see again the white faces of their own nation and hear again the cheering of their own people and know that we are of the Empire-builders, that our growing strength is Britain's hope and trust. We believe that they will return Home from this unexampled progress, not merely conscious of the burden of Empire, of the incessant care and watchfulness it demands from the. hereditary chiefs of our British folk, but inspired by our colonial welcome to be strong and of good courage in the face of danger, knowing that the devotion to King and Country which made our wonderful dominion possible exists world-wide and undiminished to keep that dominion sure.