AN ELOQUENT AMBASSADOR.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 August 1933, Page 6

AN ELOQUENT AMBASSADOR.

The “silver-tongued orator from the Southern Seas,” as Rotarian Frank Milner has been characterised by his American audiences, seems to have put New Zealand vividly on the map in the United States. In being asked to give the most important address at the annual convention of Rotary International at Boston he was paid a rare compliment and presented with a rare opportunity. And judging by the reception accorded his address, when he spoke to a gathering of 9000 Rotarians close at hand and a vastly greater audience through the sixty-five broadcasting stations with which his address was linked up, he has taken full advantage of the opportunity. The fact that he was subsequently invited to address the American public through the individual Rotary Clubs indicates the profound impression he must have created. Ever since his remarkable speech at the Pan-Pacific congress at Honolulu in 1923, when he lifted the congress to its feet with the recitation of Thomas Bracken’s “Not Understood,” Rotarian Milner established his name in America as one of the most brilliant orators of his generation, and New Zealand has cause ,to be proud of the success he has gained on his present mission. Oratorical triumphs and sound advocacy are by no means invariably synonymous, but the high lights of Rotarian Milner’s Bostori’address merely served to illuminate a definite and serious message. His illustration of the futility of war, which “has never yet settled anything,” was a passage of inspiring realism. The basis of his message was an appeal to steer a middle course between . the “jingoisms of nationalism and that excess of internationalism which runs to sloppy pacifism or vague cosmopolitanism.” A medley of “isms” indeed that makes a rather formidable mental diet, but a message, nevertheless, that America would do well seriously to heed.