A LINK WITH THE PAST

Hokitika Guardian, 20 September 1929, Page 6

A LINK WITH THE PAST

EARL OF COVENTRY’S RECORD. LONDON, August 1. Tlie Earl of Coventry has broken another record. For more than eightysix years and two months he has been a peer.

It is not easy to imagine what England was like, nor to portray the lives, the habits, the thoughts of its people when, in 1843, the little boy of five succeeded to an Earldom. To all but the youngest of us there are recollections of days without motor-cars, aeroplanes and wireless, but only a few months before Lord Coventry came into his title Queen Victoria had experienced her first train journey, from \v r indsor to London, “in half an hour, free from dust and crowd and heat,” and was “quite charmed with it.” The Queen was only twenty-four years of age. “Pussy and Bertie” (to become the Empress Frederick and King Edward) werey a' few days later, at the christening of the Princess Alice. Lord Coventry had not only outlived King Edward (his junior) by nearly twenty years but has survived to see his great grand-child in,/the line of succession to the Throne.

When we turn to the politics of 1843 we discover an England and an Ireland torn by agitators O’Connel was raising the cry of Repeal, and was arrested on a charge of conspiracy and sedition. In England the burning question was the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in this very year an Act was passecEgiving preferential treatment to Canadian-grown wheat. In nothing has public opinion changed more than with regard to the British Empire. Not only Radicals, but even Lonservative statesmen in the ’forties looked upon the colonies as millstones round our necks. For more than another ten years there was no separate Colonial Secretary—the duties . were perfored as a sideline by the Secretary of State for War. a