“OUR CROWNED REPUBLIC."

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 7912, 28 July 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

“OUR CROWNED REPUBLIC."

Although Mr. H. G. Wells has been singing the praises of “ our crowned republic.,'' it Mas Tennyson who gave us this phrase. The difference betwixt our form of monarchy and that which has fallen in Russia, and that Which is doomed to fall in Germany, is great. Who supposes that the Kaiser, had he included Australia in his dominions, ' would have allowed that congeries of colonies to amalgamate under such n title as the Commonwealth of Australia” ? That fact albno is proof positive that although we have a King, we are truo republicans. Wo do not always realise that our Constitution is le.ss than a hundred years older than the famous American Constitution, which was avowedly framed on the British model, although at tho time they were at war with their Mother Countiy. It was tho Bill of Rights, by which Parliament voted “Dutch William” and his wife Mary joint sovereigns of England. which made the realm a “crowned republic.” From tho moment the Bill of Rights gave the House of Commons r,he sole right to levy taxes, and that House resolved only to grant the Crown annual supplies, the backbone oif absolutism—such as Russia has known, and Germany still knows, despite tin© mockery of her Re : chstag—was broken, and tho nerve centres of tyranny were paralysed. Henceforth we were a “crowned republic.”