The Daily News. SATURDAY, MARCH 22. 1913. THE CHIEF OF GREECE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 258, 22 March 1913, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, MARCH 22. 1913. THE CHIEF OF GREECE.

Tlic assassination of the King of Creeee is another of (liose pitiable tragedies which from time to time give pause to the .whole world as it spins down "the ringing grooves of change.'' The act | I appears to have been that of an irresponsible and mentally deficient man who i-> pleased to describe himself as a socialist. He is not a socialist, of course, for sane socialism is a cult that has not yet adopted the argument of anarchy or the aid of assassination. The futility of force has long been recognised in all creeds of social and political economy, and the shooting down in cold blood of the generous and well-loved ruler of a nation whose magnificent history reaches back through ages of splendor is not calculated to redress either individual or combinative grievances. The tragedy, among English-speaking races, has quite a personal note, for the dead monarch was a brother of the Dowager Queen Alexandra, than whom no woman in the world save the Queen she succeeded has ever won so widely the esteem and affection of Britons the whole world over.

It is'one of those tragic, irresponsibilities that Fate seems to love to precipitate, and that the '''divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them luW we Avill," looks oil upon and smiles. It is the penalty of greatness to be always in the limelight, and the obsession which turns tiie thoughts of (hose who have real or fancied grievances to personally attack those in authority is one of the prices which rulers and kings have to pay for their hereditary or conferred authority. There is not a monarch in the world, probably, who dare walk the streets of Ilia cities with any dogvee of safety, with the exception of our King, and it i? a striking tribute to our national pride that this should be so. To be a king, in fact, is in nine cases out of ten to he "cribbed, cabined and confined" from early youth to the graveside, and the very meanest of us need never cast envious eyes upon the purple of the throne. "Better to serve in heaven than reign in liell." the poet has written, and the saying was never more (rue than in its application to modern monarehs. In the meantime the sympathy of every civilised nation will go out warmly to a people who have been so sadly stricken by a calamity so singularly futile in its conception and so pitiably useless as a political protest.