His Excellency

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 365, 21 June 1946, Page 5

His Excellency

OR the first time since it became a State New Zealand has a home-grown GovernorGeneral. Although His Excellency was born in Britain he was reared and educated in New Zealand and will go down in history as a New Zealand soldier. That, we are sure, is what he would wish himself. In any case everyone thinks of him as a New Zealander now, and it would be foolish to deny ourselves the honour of having bred a man big enough and distinguished enough to break constitutional precedents with universal approval. It was a risk that could not have been taken with any man of smaller dimensions, but is not even thought of as dangerous in the case of Sir Bernard. We accept him as the King’s representative because we are so proud to concede him his eminence among ourselves. But the King’s representative, like the King himself, is still a man. He can do his duty, the duty to which we call him, only with the consent and co-operation of the community: in this case fellow-New Zealanders, men who went to school with him, played with him, fought thé country’s enemies with him. It is for us rather than for him to make his occupation of Government House a further bright page in his story. It is we who are departing from precedent, we who must show ourselves mature enough to stand on our own legal feet. We have learnt to do it with judges, with Ministers of the Crown, with religious leaders, with all those whose duties require them to be at once in the community and aloof from it. All we require from them is that we should be able to respect them. Their sole demand of us is that we should not embarrass them by well-meant but troublesome friendliness.