The New Zealand TABLET. THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 1906 DUST TO DUST

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 25, 21 June 1906, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET.

THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 1906 DUST TO DUST

Te promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the ways of Truth and Peace. LEO. XHI, to the N.Z. TABLET

fik 0-DAY the mortal remains of the late Pre- [| mier of New Zealand pass into ' the house i with the green door '—into the place that *W (as Washington Irving says) buries every _)* error, covers every defect, extinguishes every $^52% resentment. 'He spake "well, 1 quoth Long- * Er* fellow in his 'Hyperion,' 'who said that " graves are the footprints of angels.' Around the open grave of Richard John Seddon the political differences of yesterday are forgotten, and men bow their heads in a mellowed peace and good-will which " figures that which the angels long ago proclaimed to our distracted earth. The gra\e is a great preacher and peacemaker Some statistician — we cannot at this moment label him with a name— has fixed at three score and eleven the average age of politicians. Gladstone's massive • mind was in the possession of all its virile vigoar for ten yeais past that age ; and, we think, he boasted that he could wield an axe and fell an oak as sturdily at eighty-one as at two score and ten. The late Mr. S'qddoih's d^y closed suddenly at sixty-one. His heart stopped and his soul flitted ten years short of his normal expectations of life as a legislator. Even in our days of hygiene, there are" few who scale the white summit of fourrsccre. At sixty (according to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes) we get within range of the riflepits. And isjbjbutl sixty- thoree begijns the gprand- climacteric, and nature begins tc administer her kindly anodyne. That was the age at which Emerson felt that his active literary power had left him. But statesmen are made of a toughened steel that wears better than the life-stuff of your poet or critic. At seventy years of. age our late Premier might, humanly speaking, haye_ been still in a mental prime. But he lived and wrought at too 'high pressure during his long career as the virtual ruler of New Zealand. He wrought at a steady pressure o! a hundred and tweniy pounds to the square inch. And all too often he treated the safety-valve in a perilous way. His, life was what Mantalini calls a horrid « grind 1 . Likie Brougham, he took upon his , too - willing -shoulders the work of many mem And his method was to take it by storm— to fly at it like the

whirlwind worker that he was. He had at one time hoped, the sixties were still young, to ' sit down and rest '—like another Alexander. But his later thought was to die in harness.. His was the sort of toil that (to change the simile) ' sucks a man Uke an orange, leaves him a discharged Ley den jar.' And so the crowded, hurried, over-wrought life ended in the sudden tragedy on the • Oswcstry Grange.' The Melbourne ' Argus ' of June 12 sums up as follows the outstanding phase of the late Premier's life with which we have been dealing here :—: — 1 The President always " pays for his White House," says Emerson ; and Mr. Seddon certainly paid in a shortened life for his long, enjoyment of the Premiership of his State. Wellington is the seat of Government in New Zealand, but the " Evening Post " published in March last a table showing that for three months previous to that time the Premier had not spent more than from one and a half to two days at a time there. He governed the State from railway carriages and hotel parlours, taking his secretaries with him, and being followed everywhere by departmental documents. An example of his method of work may be mentioned. A delegation froun Victoria travelling through New Zealand on public business met the Premier at an hotel. The members conversed with him till 1 a.m., then retired wearied, and arose at 8 to find the Premier gone. They learned that he had summoned his secretaries after th?y went to bed, worked till 4, rested for two hours, breakfasted, and caught a train at 7.' The Premier of the eight-hours' day seldom, perhaps, enjoyed this mediaeval luxury during the whole o! his long career as leader. The human engine kept slogging away day and night. But it was a pace that killed. And the mighty engine of energy was ' scrapped ' before its time : fallen in pieces and dismembered in one act, like the deacon's ' wonderful onehorse shay.' It was just the wearing-out that he sought— not the rusting-out that he dreaded. And the world is all the poorer that such beneficent energy is stilled in death. His was a strenuous life indeedtaking his stairs three steps at a time, working two shifts and overtime, and putting so much of his big heart in the work that it wore out and stopped still like a clock run down.