POOR BUT PATRIOTIC.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9036, 29 February 1908, Page 4

POOR BUT PATRIOTIC.

Pride of race and country is a fine thing, and a Greek has something beyond the ordinary to be proud of, if he only looks to the ancient history of his country. In these modern times he has not much to boast of. -Greece, the land of the sage, the poel., the philosopher, the orator, the soldier, the land of liberty, of the arts—alas! she is to-day not even a poor shadow of her former self. How have the mighty fallen! Patriotism at least remains. The Greek is to be found in all countries, but he never loses the love of his beauteous peninsula, or of the sunny "Isles of Greece." An instance of this patriotism cropped up at a meeting of the Charitable A ill Board at New Plymouth the other day. For years an old fisherman, known only as "Alick the Greek" has lived at Waitara. He is close upon 1)0 years of age, and has been 50 years in New Zealand. Industrious and abstemious, he has followed various callings, all more or less precarious, and his old age finds him in circumstances of pecuniary distress. He is evidently not too proud to receive assistance from his neighbours, and would be glad enough to get-the-old age pension ; but though,age and years of residence in the dominion have long qualified him for that boon, he has resolutely refused to accept it at the cost of renouncing allegiance to his own country. That country he is not likely to see again except in "visions of the night, when deep sleep fdleth upon men," but be declines to become a naturalised subject of the dominion, even to be assured of food. His patriotism scorns an independence born of dependence where disloyalty to his country is implied. He was born a Greek, said the old man proudly to a member of 'the Charitable Aid Board, and at all hazards he wool J die a Greek. Patriotism is such a splendid trait that even where it is carried to the boundary of folly, as in this case, it must still remain admirable.