ARMISTICE DAY SILENCE

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12211, 8 August 1925, Page 11

ARMISTICE DAY SILENCE

HOW IT ORIGINATED To-day, for the space of two minutes, the English-speaking world will be truly Christian, said Dr. Norman Mao-' lean, writing in the “Glasgow Herald” of November 11th. It was the dream of prophets and saints long ago that it would some day be even so, and tnat religion would sweep through our streets like a mighty vitalising flood. Time and time again it seemed to bo.realised, as when .Savonarola taught the children to go through the streets of Florence crying out their watchword, “Long Live Jeans Christ, our King”; or as when Calvin changed Geneva ter a brief spell into the city of God. but it was only in seeming. But over the world to-day the dream will be realised for two minutes. It is a wonderful story how it came about. In 1019 there was a colonial journalist, Edward George Honey, who, after a wayward career, found himself a patient in a hospital for consumptives at North wood, Middlesex. To him there came first the thought that the nation should remember the dead in a few minutes’ silence at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of "the eleventh month in each year. He wrote to the press, and the proposal was brought before the King and was

referred to his Ministers, At first it was pooh-poohed as preposterous; but there was such vitality that it could not be quenched. The- first proposal was that the silence should be' for five minutes. It was Lord Balfour who got it changed -into two minutes. Five was nnendurably long, he thought. And he was right. For -two-. minutes of ouch stress and high emotion can feel like eternity 1 And thus the King called on the nption to be still for two minutes, and to hear what the dead might say. . . .. The thought that came to a broken journalist thgs filled the people with a great’ silence.