THE LATE W. T. STEAD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 253, 25 April 1912, Page 6

THE LATE W. T. STEAD.

WORLD-RENOWNED JOURNALIST. INCIDENTS IN A REMARKABLE CAREER. A frank and delightful directness was a foremost characteristic of the late Mr. Stead, one of the victims of the Titanic tragedy. "Strange as it may seem," he affirmed once in his Review of Reviews, "the German Emperor is the only man I am anxious to meet who is not anxious to meet me." His achievements almost justified such egotism. He left the common schools to work early and late in a Newcastle merchant's office. By the time he was "eighteen his genius for journalism had led him into newspaper work, and at twenty-two he had become editor of the Darlington Northern Echo, laying down the law on all occasions, and inaugurating in England the system of government by newspapers. "Yet, when he bade farewell to all this greatness at the age of thirty for a subordinate position on the London Pall Mall Gazette," state a biographer, "very few people in the world at large had ever heard the name of Stead. In another three years very few people had not. For in that time he had made himself editor of the Pall Mall, and had been sent to prison for exposing a world-wide traffic in women, under the title of 'The Maiden Tribute.'" Mr. Stead made it part of his life's mission to assist the cause of universal peace. "I think," he once wrote, "I may say. without egotism that but for me there would be no Hague Conference for the world to talk about. It was I who took up this matter in the teeth of our indifferent public, I who saw the Czar when all the world scoffed, and I who persuaded the statesmen of Continental Europe that peace is no idle dream." In all the personal relations of life Mr. Stead was a plain, unaffected English gentleman. The graceful egotism which marked his journalism was then sloughed off. He described his own personality as American in sympathies, Russian by natural assimilation, English by birth. (While, on the, one hand, Mr. Stead was the apostle of universal peace among the nations, yet, on the other hand, he is regarded by many as having played a vast part towards the creation of Eng- ' lish naval power us it is understood today, for it is not over-stating matters to say that his publication, "The Truth about the Navy," in 1884, awakened the middle and lower classes of England to a somewhat dangerous state of things, and (taken in conjunction with the works of previous and more expert writers) paved the way for the great new fleet idea to which Sir William White gave being—the substitution of homogeneous squadrons for the old fleets im which scarcely two types were alike. Mr. Stead was born in 1849.