EMPIRE DAY.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18084, 24 May 1923, Page 6

EMPIRE DAY.

To-day is Empire Day, calling to mind at once tho greatest Queen that the world has ever seen.

As Queen Elizabeth personified insular, sturdy England, victors of the fight against the Armada, and spokes in Spain’s great wheel, so Queen Victoria was the personification and the living flame of the British Empire during the long years of her reign. Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, of all her colonies, Queen Victoria exercised a tremendous influence on the path of England from 1837 until 1901. “The Widow oi Windsor” wa severy inch a Monarch. She has passed on and the Empire has marched forward, supreme in its unity of purpose, its devotion to the one flag of which His Majesty the King speaks in a message we publish to-day. Emerson said that an Empire was an immense egotism, but the British Empire is more than an egotism. It is the greatest Commonwealth the world has over seen and is ever likely to see. Tho late Joseph Chamberlain’s famous bon mot, uttered in 1904, “Learn to think Imperially,” means more to-day than ever it did, for since that great Imperialist spoke, tho Empire has gone through tho test of fire—the Great War.

Empire Day should bo kept alive for two great reasons. ’ Ono is that the memory of a great Queen is worth while treasuring through the ages. The other is that the Empire should think of its history on at least one day in the year. No Norse saga was ever so wonderful as that retrospect.