“A GREAT MAN IS DEAD.’’

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 24, 16 June 1906, Page 21

“A GREAT MAN IS DEAD.’’

No words of ours can possibly express the mingled sentiments of dismay, astonishment, and grief that thrilled through this colony when the news reached us to-day that Mr Seddon had died at sea on his voyage from Sydney to New Zealand. It has been for some years past a matter of common knowledge that the tremendous physical and mental strain through which the Premier had passed had told even upon his iron constitution. But so accustomed have we become to think of him as invincible to ordinary weaknesses that the vast majority of his friends and admirers have hardly ever taken seriously the warnings which his occasional illness of recent years might have impressed upon us. The shock of this sudden calamity is all the more overwhelming because of the extraordinary amount of vitality and energy that the Premier displayed within the last month during his visit to Australia. But unhappily no man can expend himself so generously even for the noblest of causes without paying the penalty, and so the blow most unexpectedly has fallen at last. Mr Seddon has died, as we may well believe that he would have chosen to die, working to the end. It is quite impossible at such a moment to grasp the reality and the magnitude of such a loss as the country has suffered through this tragic event. Mr. Seddon’s career has been such that the laudations showered upon him during his own lifetime are in themselves sufficient for the noblest epitaph that a true patriot or a true man could desire. As our Australian friends told him last week, he was one of the strongest men in the Empire; and he was incomparably the strongest, the boldest, and the most statesmanlike of all the politicians who have ever held power in this country or in any of the Australian colonics. This is neither the time nor the place for an elaborate analysis of Mr. Seddon’s public career; and indeed the sense of personal loss to us all is so overwhelming that the mere recital of his achievements would probably fail to interest anybody just now. Nor, indeed, is such a record necessary. The history of Mr. Seddon’s life work is to be read on every hand in the laws, the institutions, and the social conditions of the land that was for so many years his home. “If you seek my monument, look around you.” Surely the builder of St. Paul’s had no worthier claim to that proud boast than the man to whom before all others the growth of our Democracy, with all that it means to us, is due. As the speakers at the Seddon Record Premiership Celebration said justly three years ago, the progress and prosperity of the colony during the last decade, its reputation for progressive and enlightened Government, and its high standing as a stronghold of patriotic Imperialism are due more than anything else to the .wise, bold, and able administration of Mr. Seddon; and no eulogy of ours could add much weight or force to such a panegyric as this. It is a source of satisfaction to us all to remember that Mr Seddon during his own lifetime received from his country the most emphatic assurances of confidence and gratitude that any people could bestow. The admiration which his extraordinary abilities and his strenuous courage have inspired in the neighbouring colonics has been sufficiently illustrated by his triumphal progress through the Australian States during the last month. The high appreciation

in which his services to the Empire have been held by the Imperial authorities has been proved many times over by special marks of honour conferred upon him, and even more distinctly evidenced by the impression that he produced upon men of all ranks and classes when he represented New Zealand at Home. Fortunately, he knew all this. It has not been left for a remote posterity to discover his merits, and to do tardy honour to his memory. To few men has it ever been vouchsafed to realise their ambitions so fully, or to wield political power so long with the clear consciousness that it has been used not only to the best advantage of Che people, but with their full confidence and approval. Judged by t» : ordinary standard, Mr Seddon was not an old man. But he had crowded into his sixty years an amount of successful work that centuries of toil would still have left beyond the achievement of the average man. Much was still waiting for him to do—much that, we fear, must without him remain undone. But if successful achievement and the consciousness of power are the secrets of happiness, he was a happy man. And Fate has been merciful to him in that he has not been doomed in his declining years to taste the bitterness of defeat or to feel his powers decaying with the slow advance of Time. In the fullness of his strength and at the highest pinnacle of political success, peacefully, we trust painlessly, he has reached the bourne to which we all must come; and think-, ing of him alone, we cannot but feel that Fortune has been kind to him even in the hour and article of death. But it is not only of the dead 'statesman’s career that we have to think now. When we say that the loss of Mr. Seddon is to this country irreparable we do not underestimate the ability and the public spirit of his colleagues. But the Premier towered so high above them all that it is difficult for us to realise how the public policy with which he has been so long identified can be carried on successfully without him. It is true that in one sense no man is ever absolutely indispensable; and we can safely trust Sir Joseph Ward and his colleagues to do everything in their power to follow the traditions of Democratic Liberalism on the lines which Mr. Seddon’s labours have already made familiar to them and to us. But the secret of Mr. Seddon’s success was not simply the fact that he could work harder and longer than other Ministers or make more speeches or face emergencies more boldly. The dead Premier was not merely a politician—he was a statesman. Perhaps alone among the colonial public men of his time Mr. Seddon was gifted with that rare prescience, that keen insight into the true meaning of events, that power of interpretation that enables statesmen to shape their country's course with almost prophetic certainty of vision; and it is because so few public men ever give any sign that their hearts have been touched by this “divine spark” that Mr. Seddon’s life work stands out in these colonies above all the other political or public achievements of his day and generation. Hut we have every confidence that the surviving members of the Ministry will spare no pains to discharge to the best of their powers the tremendous responsibilities entailed upon them by the terrible loss that we have all sustained.

We have not attempted to dwell at length upon the most painful and the most difficult aspect of this sad incident —its personal and emotional side. We may not dare to lift the veil that should defend the sanctity of domestic sorrow against public curiosity or even public comment. It is not for us to suggest what those who were nearest and dearest to the dead man have lost in husband, father, or friend. But we venture to offer to those who have most reason for sorrow to-day our heartfelt and most sincere condolences. If there is any power in public sympathy to assuage personal grief, it should be sonic small source of consolation to the members of Mr. Seddon’s family that the country sorrows with them to-day. And beyond the immediate limits of liis Sillily, there are many hundreds, even thousands, of men and women in this colony who will feel the death of Mr Seddon as a personal loss. For his friends were many, and confined to no one social class or political party. A hard fighter, a bold and dangerous opponent, Mr. Seddon was n faithful friend and a generous foe. lligeniality, his good nature, his kindly sympathy for suffering, his buoyant good spirits, his cheery optimism all these

qualities endeared him through ninny years to a wide circle of acquaintances; and from the diggers and their wives, who still spin yarns about “our Dick” in the old times at Kutnara, to the youngest tyro in the House to-day, all who knew him liked him. and many loved him. It is with a bitter sense of personal deprivation that those who have known him intimately must reflect that the strong hand is nerveless, the cheery voice is silent, the brave heart is still. But even from these depths of sadness there rises a sense of satisfaction at the thought that his life work was well done, that he knew the joys of victory without the bitterness of defeat, and that every man and woman who loves the Home Land and the Empire shares with us to-day our sorrow that “a Great Mau is dead.”