only gave definite and hugely popular expression to the rising feeling of patriotic sympathy with the Old Land, but anticipated similar offers from the other British colonies, to the unbounded delight of New Zealanders and the liberal advertisement of their country in lands where the very name of New Zealand was hardly known.
The fact that Mr. Seddon was the first, after the campaign, to protest against the flooding of South Africa with Chinese coolies by the men in whose interests the grievous war had unwittingly been waged, in no wise detracted from the merit of the promptitude of his offer of troops. Indeed, to the Boer War and Mr. Seddon’s share therein, New Zealand owes more than perhaps most of us readily grasp. It was really to his big-hearted impulse, his initiative, that we owe the new and broader Imperialism, and when the great Council of the Empire, as yet in nubibus is fully realised, let us remember that it is through Mr. Seddon that it has been made possible. Perhaps we were too close to him to see him in the true perspective. Half a world away they sized the big man up more accurately than even New Zealanders could. What New Zealander’s heart but beat with pride when he read, the day after the tragic news of the Prime Minister’s end, the sorrowful panegyrics cabled from all parts of the world, the eulogies of the most famous English journals! “A man of noble ideals and generous sentiments;” “a great servant of the Empire;” “the most effective labour politician of his day;” “a man whose death deprived the Empire of a powerful driving force;” “a man who largely taught the British worker to grasp the value of Empire”—these were the verdicts passed on Richard Seddon by the great voices of public opinion at the other end of the world. His strenuous and earnest advocacy of the maintenance of racial purity, too, and his efforts in the direction of the extension of British rule and New Zealand’s influence in the Pacific, were all the outcome of his splendid and far-seeing patriotism.
But again it is on the attractive personality, the very human side, of the late Premier, that one wants to dwell. His very foibles, his boisterous impulses, his little eccentricities, all
