A Prince’s Precepts.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVI, Issue XXI, 25 May 1901, Page 966

A Prince’s Precepts.

The Duke’s modestly proffered advice to the Melbourne school children was most appropriate—more appropriate than His Royal Highness could himself have understood. If there is one text more than another which has to be impressed on young Australia and young New Zealand, too. it cannot be better expressed than in the Duke’s own words, “Be thorough; do your level best in whatever work you are called upon to perform; be loyal to parents, country, King and God.” Thoroughness is not a familiar word in the colonies. The conditions of early settlement encouraged and often compelled a slipshod way of doing things. Labour and appliances were wanting, and time was precious, and work had to be done in a hurried, incomplete fashion. Perhaps the young colonial’s casualness is an inheritance from those early days, and he has drunk in with his mother’s milk the “it’ll do” spirit, which is so marked among us. We shall never build up a nation on that motto. Hard work and thorough work must be the rather unwelcome watchwords of young Australasia. That enlarged application of the term loyalty came particularly well from the Prince. Our associations with the word have been the duties of a subject to his sovereign, and now he who will one day be our sovereign himself reminds ns of its much wider significance. It is a reminder yonng Australia has need of. Willing enough, as the events of the past year have shown it to be, to risk life and limb in the service of the Empire, Young Anstrrtisi is by no means so ready to rend< >• loyal servfee in the every-day affairs of life where the glamour of ad-

venture is wanting. The phrase loyalty to parents may sound a trifle strange, not merely because the term is unusual, but also because there is wanting the spirit that dictates it. We should be grateful to the Prince that he has made it more familiar in our ears, and that not merely by precept, but by his own example. For of one thing we can speak with certainty, and that is the loyal spirit which characterises every utterance of the Duke.