THE DUTY OF SERVICE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 11, 23 December 1911, Page 4

THE DUTY OF SERVICE.

Lord Chelmsford, who was in England for the Coronation, spoke of it at the prize-giving ceremony at Sydney Grammar School the other day, He told the boys that some people talked of it as an anachronism, an idle ceremony. No one present at 't could agree with that description. It seemed to him to strike two notes—the note of service and the note of continuity. The Coronation ceremony meant that a monarch had dc-th-cated himself to the service of his country symbolically it meant, jusu, lie believed, that tire nation was dedicating itself to the work before it. Now, as the note of service- was present or absent in a country’s b story, so that country waxed or waned. r J hat was shown in the history of Greece and Rome, in the French Revolution, in the rise of Germany, and lately in the rise of Japan. A school such as this would always turn out men who would remember this duty of service to their country. Again, m this twentieth century, people were apt to think themselves cut off from past centuriesj that,the present was'everything to thorn. But every boy there owed something to the thousands of years that had gone before* him; no one could cut himself off from the past. One of the factors of life today was heredity. These things were represented at the Coronation by the Crown; the King of Great Britain and Ireland and the Dominions beyond the seas still wore the "crown worn once by Edward the Confessor. They were represented again by the stone of Scone, under the Coronation Chair. It came from Scotland, and before that perhaps from Ireland, and upon it the Scottish Kings up lo the time of King Edward 1., were crowned. So heredity must play its part in the lives of nations; they wore hewn out of the same rock as the old British race. Though with their tuvironment they could make themselves different men, and ho 1 oped they would be better men, than their ancestors in England, still there was that history behind them.