FAREWELL SPEECHES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 January 1939, Page 6

FAREWELL SPEECHES

vHOW STATESMEN DEPARTED. The great Lord Derby’s farewell to his fellow peers was both dignified and pathetic. “My Lords,” he began, “I am now an old man, and like many of your lordships I have already passed the three-score years and ten; my official life is entirely closed, my political life is nearly so, and in the course of Nature my natural life cannot now be long.” Sir Robert Peel said “good-bye” to the House of Commons in an exceedingly powerful speech in opposition to Lord Palmerston’s policy in sending afleet to blockade Greece. Peel rose to speak at 1 o’clock on the morning of Saturday, June 20, 1850, and made a scathing denunciation of Palmerston’s foreign policy. A few hours later Peel’s horse stumbled and threw him on Constitution Hill, and on the following Tuesday the great statesman breathed his last.

O’Connell made his final appearance at Westminster when he was suffering from softening of the brain, and was a feeble, bent, broken, old man. Yet his farewell speech, in opposition to a Coercion Bill, occupies 18 pages in ’Hansard,’ though not a word of it was heard in the gallery, or even across the House.

Sheridan’s eloquent tongue was heard for the last time at Westminster on July' 21, 1812, urging England to fight to the last drop of blood against Napoleon. The last speech of the great Earl of Chatham was the most pathetic of them all. Chatham was carried to the House swathed in flannels, and, leaning on a crutch, with little more to be seen within his large wig than his penetrating eyes and aquiline nose, he began his farewell speech with these words: “I am old and infirm —more than one foot in the grave. I have risen from my bed to stand up in the cause of my country, perhaps, never again to speak in this House.” As he spoke something of his old fire and energy returned to him, and he concluded with a burst of rare eloquence, ending with the words: “Shall the people that 17 years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell, its ancient inveterate enemy, ‘Take all we have, only give us peace?’ It is impossible!” Chatham’s great son, William Pitt, closed his last public speech —it was delivered at the Mansion House —with these pathetic words “Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.” Palmerston spoke his final words in the House on Maj’ 23, 1865, in answer to a question as to how the “Times” had obtained certain information as to the forthcoming Budget. “Newspapers,” he said, "live on the future as well as on the past and present; and it is their business to make guesses, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. When they are right they gain credit; when they are wrong people soon forget their mistakes.” Cobden last used his eloquence in opposition to the extension of Government manufactures. “I advise you,” the great Free Trader said, “in future to place yourselves entirely in dependence on the private manufacturing resources of the country. If you want gunpowder, artillery, small arms, or the hulls of ships of war, let it be known that you depend upon the private enterprise of the counry, and you will get them."

Beaconsfield's last Parliamentary speech was a protest against the evacuation of Candahar, on March 4, 1881: and Gladstone’s was an eloquent onslaught on the Upper Chamber. "I think," he concluded with ringing voice, “that in some way or other a solution will have to be found for this tremendous contrarity and incessant conflict between the representatives of the people, and those who fill a nominated or non-elected Chamber.”