EMPIRE DAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 May 1939, Page 5

EMPIRE DAY

MESSAGE FROM VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE. THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE. LONDON, This Day. “Once more, as president of the Empire Day Movement, I send you warm greetings, coupled with the earnest hope that the flame of loyalty to the Crown and of patriotic devotion to our world-wide Empire burns as brightly as ever in your hearts and lives,” states Viscount Bledisloe, president of the Empire Day movement. “The spirit of service is, above all, that which should animate today all those who belong to our British Commonwealth of Nations and who are proud of its traditions, its ideals and its incomparable mission upon earth. Such service included the service of God, the service of the State, and the service of our fellow-men, particularly those of every race, colour and creed who share our Imperial heritage. Our British peoples are generously endowed with the priceless benefits of freedom, just laws and the mutual confidence which flows from unfettered democracy. But commensurate with our privileges is the greatness of our responsibilities. Upon the courageous shouldering of those responsibilities depend the solidarity and integrity of the British Empire, and with it the future peace and prosperity of the world. Confronted with international enmities and misunderstandings and widespread human tribulation and unrest, let us remain true to our traditions and ideals, prepared to follow, with undaunted courage, the path of duty, wherever it may lead. Never have the various parts of the Empire been more closely linked in

.fraternal affection, more solid in their ‘sympathies or more mutually trustful than they are today, and the whole human family have derived benefit from their friendly co-operation. “Let us above all hold fast to the anchorage of truth and righteousness. Let us each and all, young and old, this Empire Day, in face of a tendency in many lands to accept a lower standard of faith and conduct than that which has hitherto guided the civilised world, bravely resolve to remain steadfastly loyal to the faith of our fathers and to those high principles upon which the British Empire has been built up, and without which it cannot endure. To be true Imperialists we must maintain unshaken our faith in God. in the Empire and in ourselves.”