The Timaru Herald. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1901.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 11592, 30 October 1901, Page 2

The Timaru Herald. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1901.

The celebration of the millenary or thousandth anniversary of the death of King Alfred, at Winchester, during the third week of September, was made g. more intelligible function by the fine speech delivered by Lord Rosebery, " the public orator of the Empire," at the unveiling of a' statue of the founder of England. We reprint this speech to-day from a Loudon journal, and we feel sure that, apart from the question..of the far larger number of people who can be affected by it as compared with Thorneycroft's statue, Lord Rosebery's address is the more valuable historical reminder of the two. The next generation, on seeing the statue, will see in it but an effigy of a fine-looking man, of. a king, no doubt, because the' effigy is croVned ; a fine work of art it may be, and worth looking at on that account; but conveying no instruction, still less any inspiration. Lord Rosebery's speech conveys both, and all the English-speaking world can have the opportunity of bentfiting by them. A curious conflict of reflections is suggested by a further remark made by Lord Rosebery at the Mayor cf Winchester's luncheon after the unveiling ceremony, when his lordship said : "A quarter of a century ago there was not the same passiofi for raising memorials of our great historic heroes. How does that come about? How is it that we have now gone back a thousand years to find

a great liero with whom we may associate something of English grandeur and the origin of much that makes England powerful? Is it not the growing sense of British Empire, the increased feeling, not for bastard, but for real Imperialism ? With a present not always cheerful, with <i remote past so small and yet so pregnant, we yet dignify and sanctify .our own aspirations by referring them to the historic past." This shows some parallelism to a remark of Froude, in his. Essay on Representative Men: "We have—(now-a-days, he means) —no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of any service to us." We are inclined to think that Lord Rosebery gave contradictory answers to his own conundrum, and that the second answer is the truer one. Indeed, the noble lord himself only suggested, putting into interrogative form, the thought that the desire to honour the memory of the hero of a thousand years ago was born of the modern. Imperialistic sentiment; and tne suggestion is confused by an indefinite division of that sentiment into "bastard" and "real." Much better, more in accord-' ance with : he truth, is the alternative explanation that by the Alfred Millenary it was unconsciously sought to " dignify and sanctify our own aspirations by referring them to the historic past." . That is to say, by so much as this reflection is true, Alfred is the Briton's ideal king, his government the ideal government. • The special honour just paid to the embodiment of this ideal, shows not only that those who assembled at Winchester, and all who sympathise with Lord Rosebery's utterance entertain that ideal, but also recognise that it is an ideal, non-existent in fact to-day, and desire that- it should if possible be realised afresh in a government—not in a king, as we have changed the form and transferred the power and the responsibility to other hands—in a government that should be worthy of Lord Rosebery's panegyric on Alfred. Let any one read his Lordship's speech, and make, as he proceeds, a running comparison with the character and doings of the British government of to-day, and for a quarter of a century back, and it will soon be apparent why we must go back in history to find the identification, or at all events the close association, of fact and aspiration that all must wish for. Lord Rosebery's allusion to a possible relation between the feeling for "real Imperialism " and the desire to commemorate the greatness of Alfred, was rather a curious one, in view of the fact that the idea of holding the Alfred Millenary originated with Mr Frederic' Harrison, a man who is known as an "arch antiImperialist and Little Englander." But perhaps Mr Harrison 'would say that " real Imperialism " means —-first and foremost at all events —concern for England and England's people, not concern for half ; the world beyond. It is probably true that, as wine becomes mellowed by age, the lapse of a thousand years has made King Alfred appear to be a grander personality than he really was, though some historians tell us that his good qualities have not been much if at all exaggerated. The important thing- is that we should be able to recognise and properly appreciate a noble character when it is described to us, and so eager is mankind to secure a gallery of such portraits, that a mythic clement, if not too obtrusive, is cheerfully disregarded, provided there was a substantially noble life behind the legendary accretions. And of this, in the case of King Alfred, there is not the slightest doubt. He was "Alfred thff Good, Alfred the Truthteller, Alfred the Father of his Country," to his contemporaries, as well as to his millenial posterity.