THROUGH TAY PAY'S" SPECTACLES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2735, 15 August 1906, Page 14

THROUGH TAY PAY'S" SPECTACLES.

Mil O»COKNOfi ON Mft SEDDOSX. ffmax Os& Owx Couxsyohszht.) LONDON, June 22. In the current number of the new paper, P.T.0., Mr T. P. O'Connor gives to the extant of two whole pages his impressions «nd recollections of the late Mr Seddon. £m these are extremely interesting to those yrbo had known the lorte Premier— albeit, fterhaps, a, trifle over-coloured — I make Wome fairly copious selections from the •article. „ Under the heading "A Dreamer Dreaming Greatly; 'Dick' Seddon," Mr O'Connor j»ys: fie was a devil of a man. I never realised the terrific force he was until one jnight, attending a dinner given in his IbonouT and in that of some of his colonial colleagues, I beard' him make a speech. I do not remember a word of the speech; I;here was not an. argument in it that I do not,* on consideration, believe to have been unsound; there Awe-re few people in the room who ' really did not have the sameopinion; and yet iHero we all- sat — spellbound, silent, as it were hypnotised and benumbed. Whether we agreed or dis•greed—whether we admired or disliked him and hJB sayings, did not aeem to matter; no were all under' the strange spell, and we lost for 1 the time being power to criticise, to analyse, even to applaud. MAGNETIC ORATORY. 1 have seen other men before and since Mr Seddon exercise a strange spell over the ihea<rts and intellects of a crowd of men. Whenever John Bright got up in the House of Commons members were moved to their spinal columns by the mere thrill of the* glorious voice as it uttered the common •words, "Mr Speaker— Sir." Mr Gladstone could awe an assembly into the silence of the grave. I saw Henry Irving keep a whole audience quiet throughout a, first ■performance of "King Lear," in which few people understood one word out of ©very three he uttered. This was sheer force of personality, which is a different thing from that exercised by extraordinary oratorical powers. And so it was with Seddon. It was his personality that told and not hia oratory. Loud-voiced, strong phrased, picturesque, perhaps even a little bktant, his oratory was not of the type to command an audience at a big dinner in London; it was too tempestuous and too loud in key for them. And if such a speech as that I heard had been delivered by a small man, or a big man with a small personality, neapl© would have yawned, in the end would have dispersed into the buzz of conversation, and finally might have interrupted him with the fatal and sinister cry of " Time, time ! " A PORTRAIT. Why, then, were we all silent, respectful, mesmerised? The is the man's dominating personality. It was dominating -from every point of view. I have" been trying to think what character in fiction would give my readers a correct idea of the man as he was, and as he revealed himself on this night. I might have said Falataff; but that would nave given only a partially accurate idea, for Seddon had none of the voluptuary, and still less* of the poltroon that was in Faistaff* Then 1 thought of Henry V; but then Henry V was too regal in his .way. And then I thought of the Bastard m King John — that wondrous rebel— the child of Mother Earth — gigantic, irresistible, and yet held down to servitude and shame by the gossamer threads of convention. Put all three together, and you have some idea of what this man looked like and seemed to be. Physically, he most resembled Falstaif. The head was as big as that of an ox ; the face was, again, more like the massive face of an ox than that of a man; and the beard, heavy, though not long, the big nose, the protruding and defiant eyes, big almost as saucers, and the look of terrific energy in the whole expression — all this looked more like the .strength of the ox — perhaps I should have eaid the buffalo — than the face of the mere ordinary human being The body was on the same big lines. The shoulders were as broad as those of the typical nawv who lurches through life as though his frame were too unwieldy to move easily; the chest was broad and deep; the arms seemed all muscle; and the waist had the swelling proportions which are the sign of robust and sedentary middle ase. In short, if you wanted a good portrait in the flesh — except that he had a "-beard— of the John Bull that figures in poster and caricature, you could not have found a better model than Dick Seddon. HUMAN LOCOMOTIVES. Daniel Webster, the great American Orator, used to be called a steam engine in breeches. ""Seddon was * steam engine in breeches whenever he got on his legs. The ■voice was like the roll of thunder. There were no soft notes in it. There were even no modulations. Starting at the top note of » bellow, it bellowed cm the top note right to the end of a speech even an hour and a-half in duration. There was no pause, there was no relief, there was no tight and shade; it was just one long bellow. And in the meantime you saw that the tremendous physical strain was revealing itself even in that giant and robust frame. Beads of perspiration, which somehow or other looked larger than the ordinary perspiration of the ordinary man, rolled out of the high, broad forehead and the huge face; the gesture was so abundant and forcible that speech-making might ■be regarded in his case almost as a Sandow exeroise; every bit and every ounce of. the huge body— l6st in weight — seemed to be moviti'g with every word; in short, the bellowing voice seemed to be the •team coming from some gigantic locomotive that snorted and panted and shook in every nerve of its complicated interior. i dwell on the man's exterior because it was the revelation both of his temperament and even of his history. Everything that be ever thought, or did, or achieved was written by Nature's legible handwriting on his face and figure. It was a- curious, but not, in its beginnings, a very novel history. He was all Lancashire: Lancashire in his robustness of physique, in his bluntness, in hie broad, genial, enjoying, bustling, pushful mature, wiiat was ourious about him, and 6eemed a little out of accord with his general appearance and character, was his parentage. He came from gentlefolk in the best sense of the word — that is to say, from a father and a mother who were both well educated enough to be teachers. I should, looking at him, rather expect to hear of a

blacVsmith or navvy father than of one whose -weapons in life's struggle were books instead of the anvil and the pick. After giving a sketch of Mr Seddon'e early career in New Zealand — which would not convey any new information to New 2eaJandera— «Mr T. r, O'Connor prooee<J»; The public-house wa? glorified into what was called an hotel. I suppose it was a wooden shanty, with a roaring bar, small and bare bedrooms, with probably a miner in delirium tremens in one or two of the rooms — in short, the kind of thing one sees in the mining camp in so many parts, of the world; and that this Lancashire giant, fearless but genial, was the kind of man to rule and exploit the beings — some of them rich and successful and sober, and most of them poor and broken and dissipated — creatures that had been men— who are to be seen around such an establishment. A POLITICIAN'S NURSERY. It w£? squalid, perhaps even horrid, but it was all part of the necessary training for the extraordinary career that was opening up before this man. Abraham Lincoln learned how to rule the Americans, and above all how to address them, around the stoves of wooden hotels, at the counters of squalid saloons in the Western villages of his country : «.nd Seddon learned to know human beings in the little publichouse and the shanty hotel of his early New Zealand home. Then he, by a natural transformation, became a politician, and from the moment lie entered publio life his progress was unbroken; he had come to his own. He -was % demagogue, doubtless. His methods, I dare say, were rough and ready, sometimes even questionable ; he did not Believe in reaching his ends by the methods of the anchorite, the philosopher, or the saint; he took human nature as he found it, used it, helped it, bullied it, exalted it. In 6uch a new country as that which he had to rule such methods were almost inevitable. HIS LIFE WORK. And now what did he do for the nation j that gave him omnipotence for more than j a decade? , Did he deserve well of the Republic? Did he make adequate return? ! I cannot pronounce any final opinion upon the ultimate results of his policy; there ypu get into the region of hot controversy, and the fruit* of much of his work will not be known till long after his epoch has passed away. But on the surface of it he seems to have been a beneficent despot. The oredit of his colony was lifted from the gutter into which it had fallen; there is abundant employment, there are good wages, and the workers have received legislative favours of which only Utopians dare yet dream in this country. Employer and servant can be forced by law into arbitration; there are pensions for the old; the hand in the mill, the assistant in the shop, everybody .who labours is fenced round with legislative protection and patronage. Every woman, as well as every man, in the island has a vote ; if Democraoy in its most advanced shape ever got a chance anywhere in the world, it is in New Zealand. And none of .this would have been possible without Seddon. It required his giant strength, his immense will, his eelf-confi-dence, perhaps also his political blindness and shortsightedness, to make such wild experiments. And whatever he did and whatever he was, he did not spare himself in the service of his people and his country. At 61 years of age he recently visited the Wild West Coast, which so constantly stood by him, and his lost weight did not prevent him, in soite of a recent bad breakdown in health, from — I am quoting an article by one who knew him — " crossing unbridged quick-sanded rivets and stumping up the vast and magnificently beautiful Franz Josei Glacier, which runs down one of the wooded West Coast valleys. It is a very different thing from walking about a email European glacier." And this year (says the same writer) "he has been all up and down the colony, laying foundaiion-sfcones. addressing meetings, welcoming the New Zealand footballers — here, there, and everywhere. The wonder is that a man of euch ' rampageous ' vitality, whom to watoh at work was like watching a steam-engine, should not have worn himself out long before." THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN. The final scene was as dramatically appropriate as though it had been arranged by some playwright of genius. For he died of overwork ; and as he was dying he thought of the two things dearest to him — his country and his family. His farewell message to Mr Bent, Prime Minister of Victoria, began : " Leaving to-aaight for God's Own Country." And he died, "resting his head on Mrs Seddon'e shoulder, and exclaiming, 'Oh, mother! Oh, mother!' "—what a wealth of love, remembrance, racial instinct, and habit the familiar words raise up! It is the term j in which hundreds of thousands of the race, that lives in Old England and in New, sums j up the tender affection, loyalty, unity, ! which light ud the majority of English ', homes- '