42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 1927. YOUNG MEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 112, 2 August 1927, Page 8

42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 1927. YOUNG MEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

A CALL to the young men of tlie Empire to enter public life comes clear and insistent from Montreal where Mr. Stanley Baldwin, the first Prime Minister of England to visit Canada while still the Empire’s leading administrator, received an inspiriting welcome from the homely people of a great city. It was to be expected that the King’s sons and his chief commoner would be taken at once and gladly to the warm bosom of Canada. From the huddle of great warehouses along a noble river right up the slope set about with trim cottages to the mansions of millionaires, on the shoulders of Mount Royal, there is enough British patriotism to answer all the foolish talk about the danger of Canadians looking across their southern border for ideal principles and policies of government. It is true that Canadian hearts are filled with love of wide spaces, golden prairies, great forests, majestic waterways and an ample sky, but they also retain affection for the old countryside that is their homeland. And thus the spirit of Empire not only made Montreal’s welcome glow with British loyalty, but inspired Britain’s Prime Minister to make a clarion call upon Empire patriotism for better public service. Mr. Baldwin was almost jubilant in his message from and about tlie Motherland to Canada. “Any one who says that Britain is decadent in any way,” he declared to a thousand members of the Canadian Club, “was making the biggest mistake in the world. There never was a time when the Empire had more life than now, and its heart was never better.” Nothing need be added to that, and nothing taken away. Let the truth of it run around the Empire as a song of rejoicing. There is much to ponder over, however, in Mr. Baldwin’s appeal to young men to enter public life. He did not make the appeal lightly or without a full appreciation of the penalties involved in national service. Indeed, it was made in the consciousness of the necessity for warning young men against the great trials that fall to the lot of statesmen. And he spoke as one having no delusions left as to the bitterness that is at the core of the golden apple of politics. Hear the man’s cry of anguish!: “If any man did not believe it, let him take half of my job.” It may be said that if the young statesmen in the Dominions were suddenly called upon to accept the blistering criticism hurled at Mr. Baldwin instead of the sycophantic nonsense with which they are nourished in futility, deported critics would crowd the gangways of every outgoing boat. Here is a sample of English comment on Mr. Baldwin’s service, as flung at him by the “New Statesman.” “That he will soon be sent back to his pigs is certain, and he will go back to them with a reputation which no one will envy him—with the reputation, that is to say, not only of not having been up to his job, but of being either a conscious or unconscious cheat. . . . He has acted consistently in every case as the most pliant tool that the moneyed middle-class to which he belongs has ever possessed during the past hundred years.’’ He is not quite so plastic or knavish as all that, of course, but such criticism at least reveals the courage required of a statesman to meet the blasts of modern radicalism. A good Tory thrives on buffetings; a bad one whimpers and wriggles. Meanwhile, Canada docs well to welcome and honour a valiant statesman and an honest man.