THE PRINCE ON ENGLAND

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15272, 23 June 1923, Page 19 (Supplement)

THE PRINCE ON ENGLAND

MEANINGS OF THE WORD.

REAL SIGNIFICANCE 0® “HOME.”

The Prince of Wales, who said that he was just getting over rather a severe attack of laryngitis, presided at the St. George’s Day banquet of tho Royal Society of St. George at Lhffl London Guildhall.

The Prince was given a great re» ception. His voice showed signs of huskiness, but with an effort he succeeded in making himself heard throughout the great hall. “The word England,” he said, “suggests many different ideas to different kinds of Englishmen; the greater part of our juvenile population, for instance,, think of it simply as that portion of the globo which, from time to time, produces eleven good cricketers to play Test matches (and sometimes to win them) against Australia or South Africa; while to a lot of their elders it seems to stand only for a particularly draughty corner of NorthWest Europe, much favoured as a residence by the influenza germ. “But we know what England has been, still is, and, please God, will be, so lon gas men continue to use the word. We know that there is no better place, and we know that if we have to leave it we arc never really happy till we get back again. “Englishmen as a race do not oare to talk about their country, and to blow its trumpet is un-English. But there is one attribute of England I should like to touch on, though It Is rather difficult to express In words. I mean all the associations /bound up In that essentially English word ’home.’ , , “Nobody can call me a stay-at-home.’ Nobody, least of all myself, can deny that my friends outside England have always made me feel very much ‘at home’ whenever I have visited them. “But, none the less, when I hear that word, I think of England; and it Is just the same with all Britishers of English descent all the world over. They speak of England as ‘home’ no matter where they may have been born.” The Scot and St. George. Discussing the society and the work that its honorary secretary, Mr Howard Ruff, has done for it, the Prince said: “It must be a great consolation to Mr Ruff to think that every time a Scotsman or a Welshman takes a sovereign off an Englishman and puts a Treasury note into his breast pocket he goes away unconsciously wearing the effigy of St. George next his heart. “The American Ambassador (Mr Harvey) I see is to follow me’ in proposing the toast of England," continued the Prince. “From the look in his eye and from what I have heard him say on many occasions, I suspect that, hailing s ,he does from New England, he has a soft corner in his heart for Old England too.” Both True Englands. Mr Harvey said that Britannia and Columbia willingly abided their own 'times, and, clasping hands across the -seven seas, gratefully and gladly did homage to their common Motherland. .Churlish indeed would be the spirit of a New England which at such a time would withhold honour and reverence from the Old England to whom she owed her very being. Nor could she if -she would, for both were true Englands, true to English principles as against Socialist theories; true to the English Christian fath as opposed -to Bolshevist pagan prcatlces; true to the highest of aspirations which they shared and shared alike—to raise'higher and higher and bear further and further into the wilderness the torch of civilisation.