ROYAL ACADEMY BANQUET.

Hokitika Guardian, 8 May 1923, Page 2

ROYAL ACADEMY BANQUET.

SPEECH BY PRINCE OF WALES. ADVERTISING .AND ART. AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION. LONDON, May 5. Tho Prince of Wales was the pi incipal guest at the Royal Academy banquet. Referring to his recent battle fields tour and the beauty and dignity of graveyards of the British dead, the Prince said a decadent race could never have produced the men who lio there. Equally, a decadent race could never have so fittingly perpetuated their memory. In the opinion of many, the war had left tho "average man more sensitive to artistic suggestion. The Prince did not for a moment believe that industrialist and artistic development were necessarily antagonistic. We justly resented the inference sometimes drawn from Napoleon's epigram that wo were a nation of shop keepers. That because we keep shop successfully we neglect our shop windows, and that because we had commercial .shrewdness we were totally unappreciative of art. Our hoardings might now be called, without exaggeration, the art galleries of the groat public. Many of the greatest successes on these hoardings were reproductions of pictures which have hung in the Royal Academy. Advertisements now wore a necessary adjunct to business life, and their refinement has advanced so as to justify their description as artistic, and their influence in bringing colour and decoration to otherwise grey monotonous streets is not to be despised. Hon. Amer.v, responding to the toast of “The Navy” said it was obvious that the defence of tho Empire could not be sustained indefinitely by one small island in the North Sea. It must depend upon the co-partnership of the Dominions. They must recognise the necessity for a. central naval base in the outer seas. That was the obvious answer to tho need lor complete mobility, east and west, from a central position. Without an active, strong Navy, the Army would he of little use in a war.