Page 1 Advertisements Column 5

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 1997, 5 February 1907, Page 1

THE DAYS WE REMEMBER. (By “Toluinga” in N.Z. Hornld.) Anniversary Day is one of tlio very low days wo publicly remember, thorn'll it ought to he Olio of the very .'rent many. For there is not a day m the whole year—Leap Year included which has not been the birthday of a erreat event and made memorable by some happening which has seemed to turn “the iron helm of Fate,” though it didn’t, of course, being nart of Fate and itself predestined fi cun tlio very beginning. If it does u , ,r o od to remember tlieso tilings, and it is possible that it may, wo oiH'ht to have ft great anniversary once a month, and a minor celebration at least once a week. 'Whereas, we have only the Anniversary that ive associate with the settlement of Auckland, and those of the King’s birth and the Prince of Wal<\s’ birth, which, as free-speaking Englishmen, wo can frankly admit we do not intimately associate with anything at all. There is the Christ),an Year, of course, but to most of us the Christian anniversaries are remembered solely because of their holiday associations and liot kept as festivals because of their meaning. The days we remember are few indeed, yet they ought to be very many. If wo take New Zealand, the day of Cook’s landing ought,- !o bo a public holiday throughout the .colony, oven if wo propose t'o ignore the doings of the gallant Dutchman who wrote the flame of the woman lie loved on our furthermost headland, from which no true lover will ever pull it down.. The day of the proclamation of British sovereignty ought, to be remembered : the day of frontier war; the day of native peace. For wo may easily forget that we are sons of the sea, who followed Cook over t’lio ocean, and still moree easily, that within sight of Maungakiekie children have been slain by savage raiders, and that the smoke of ravaged farms has been seen by watchers from Moun Eden. We keep the tale green of the landing in Auckland by our yearly festival, but that is only a part of wliat was. And we might do worse than display before the eyes of schoolchildren the record of our great colonial happenings, on their day of the year, for nobody is the worse for a reminder of the great deeds anti days of the past. But) if we took British national days we should need to make a new calendar to include every day in the year. For our national days are not the days on which kings and princes happened to bo born, but days on which men great and small wrought great deeds for their country, and came to the culmination of great effort. The day that Francis Drake first bore the English Hag. into the lockod-im Pacific, locked up by Papal bulls and Spanish cruelties and incpiisition horrors; the day that Rodney struck at Manila and taught the lions that the Pacific was hold in English keeping; the day lhat Dewev followed the track of Rodney and ended for ever the four-century struggle between Spain and the Englisliry. These are national days, with a hundred others, as momentous to other parts as tlieso to us, and equally universal in their results The day that Sebastian Cabot sailed westward from Bristol, the day that Raleigh planted his settlers in the Virginias, the day the Plymouth Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock—those are as meaningful as the Glorious Fourth, which now British and Americans can keep with mutual goodwill. Days to remember! Why the woods are full of them—not only of the days of Hastings, Bannockburn, and Dunbar, but of Blacky Heads, Trafalgar, Niles, and Waterloos. And talking of Dunbar, may it not be fairly said for the Englanders that they are the only people who cheerfully and without animosity accept a well-deserved thrashing? No good Englishman grudges the Scotch their Bannockburn, or the Americans their Glorious Fourth, or the French their Joan of Arc. He acknowledges Bruce to be a hero, Washington n king of moil, Joan a vilely-usrjd heroine, but who ever'heard'a’Scotchman admit that if ever a people richly deserved punishment. they deserved what Cromwell gave them at Dunbar? And this peril aps is because. England, with all her faults, is still the great, heart of Anglo-Saxondem, an I is too sure of her strength t'o belittle her weaknesses, too epuserpus ol her glory to ‘ seek to bide her shame. For wliat. she is, her people love her, and love her none tlio less because they have wandering feet and wandering eyes. And does it not seem, if we come Uo think it out, that the greatest love of all love is (hat wlucb dons not deceive itself, which takes that which is and accepts it without demur? In her glory or In her shame, in her strength or in her weakness, with her fair head in the clouds of victory or trampled to the earth in the dust of defeat the man who is English is for England, through it all. He does not need to fcppp St, George’s Day or to profess kipsliip with every countryman, or to form societies', and chibs like men of the lesser nations. Boast of all does be need to concern liimsolf with lip-loyalty, for be is one of the men who are at hand in a pinch, when others fall away and deeds take the place of words. So be will toss lip Ills cap for Bannockburn and shout for Washington, and curse the torturers of French Joan and agree that Drake was somewhat of a pirate—for bow can a man be small and mean who has given language or law or Consitution to every State that counts in the Western World ?

However, that doesn’t got us any I'iirthpr y,-ith the pathimil Cjdendar, which every pppi can till up at leisure!, molting for himself an approved Hook of .Days, one which the Positivists might or mightn’t approve. For the days to remember are the days of our own groat deeds, and not of foreign deeds. AVe may admire Joan of Arc, hut' wo can leave to Frenchmen the celebration of our villainous Foolish burning of her and remember ourselves the day when Florence Nightingale sailed for the Crimea. And though we may admire Peter the Cleat and his shipbuilding, we have more to ho thankful for in floor go Stephenson and the day he rim his firs! locomotive. Hut 1 although the State, is apt to forget the doings of its sons and daughters, and so mnv need the publicat ion and celebration of anniversaries, there is no need for common men and women to find aids to remembrance in flip tlfings t-liat concern themselves. The difficulty is not that they do not remember; it is often that they remember too intensely and too' long. Green is many a memory of which every trace seems to have passed, and sacred to one or another is every day and every hour on which the sun shines or the night fails. For still wo live, in the wonderful ways which we can neither control nor understand, by repeating year after year the round of life and accumulating experience upon experience, memory upon memory. AA'c may try to forget, but remembrance lifts its bead and we see again the tilings that were, we feel again the throb of past emotions, wo touch again tile very reality of lips and /hands. Hike magic panorama the landscapes of the past roll out before us and in them we tread again and have our being. And those tilings which we remember {post are the things which affect, our living and mould our lives. AVliat do we not lemcmher, as tile years roll and the days come and ro —the sound of partetK-oiccs, the cl i o of parted hands, the clinging of parted lips? Days of .ioy and days of sorrow, of surprise and disappointment, of pain and pleasure, of wild hope and wilder despair! Do wo 110 b trace them, all of us, through the year, and trace them, surest and closest when our anniversaries are celebrated nowhere saving in the secret places of our hearts?

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