The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND MONDAY, JULY 21, 1930. AN UPRIGHT ADMINISTRATOR

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1029, 21 July 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND MONDAY, JULY 21, 1930. AN UPRIGHT ADMINISTRATOR

ALD men by the chimney corner alone and beat would nnderV stand the greatness of the late Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Stout, and also why he gained and deserved in a long lifetime almost all the within the bestowal of an appreciative country. For lie was of the pioneer generation which had to begin a hard race knowing that victory more often would go to the strong rather than to the swift. And more than most men in his own time the sturdy immigrant from the Shetland Islands had within himself all the attributes which command success in any walk of life. He had the best Scottisli gifts of clear and vigorous thinking, intensity of purpose,, a passion for education and a remarkable perseverance. These virtues of character raised him from the relatively humdrum obscurity of a village schoolmaster to a statesman's faine in the country of his adoption. Jt might be added as a tribute, too, that the departed veteran administrator of justice and polities also had more than the ordinary Scot’s desire and determination to put a foolish world right in his own way of stern isdom. ibis trait throughout his distinguished career had a tendency to set him farther apart and aloof from many people than was justifiable in his true character. The moral conditions upon which Sir Robert Stout based his own life from the full flush of youth and health sixty years ago right onward to silvered maturity, but not a bowed age, were the love, the pursuit, the practice of truth in everything. Moreover, at all times he was faithful to principles and to friends. If this exalted manner of living sometimes, indeed, often, made his political and legal judgment appear cold and stern as a Shetland winter, those who felt the edge of his decisions at least realised, if perhaps they might not always be able to appreciate the truth’, that the man himself was loyal to liis sense of moral obligations and lived the right life as he believed it should be lived bv everv man. There was little that was soft in the sentiment of the last of the stalwart pioneer Liberals and passionate ’ advocates of democratic progress and good government. Ilis own experience had not only taught him, but had emphasised the value of selfreliance and constant effort to promote individual enterprise. As an earnest seeker of a faith that could sustain most men he honestly could not see that prayer for daily bread would ever be an adequate substitute for work. This lack of religious belief in the general sense deprived him of much sympathetic fellowship, but it never, robbed him of power to live the very faith that he could not find in all the different creeds. So he took his own road to the White Gate at “the desert of eternity,” and followed it without a tremor, alwaj-s achieving and forever setting the highest kind of example even for cocksure wayfarers. The present generation for whom, unfortunately, politics apparently began with Seddon and ended with Massey and Ward knows very little of the excellent service Sir Robert Stout rendered to New Zealand in the fighting days of his young manhood. He was a lover of true democracy, and believed all his life that the whole fate of civilisation depended entirely upon education—not merely the mental aptitude which enables peopleto earn a thousand pounds a year instead of merely five pounds a week, hut such instruction as develops character and makes man a guardian of the highest moral conduct. It is true that if even the most patient and diligent of historians were to search the records of half a century’s administration they would not find triumphs of achievement or even proof of genius in the political and judicial work of the dead statesman, but they would see plainly everywhere fine evidence of uprightness, honest effort, intense loyalty, and a ceaseless striving for the best material and moral progress for New Zealand. Ilis influence remains in the educational system and judicial activities of his country. “His was the search after what is over the great field of the" world,” not after what may be in phenomenal form. In his life Sir Robert Stout was keen, exact, penetratingly truthful. The end was a steady tranquillity in knowledge of having lived a man’s life without a blemish.