Royal Visit

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 457, 25 March 1948, Page 5

Royal Visit

HERE is not much more to be said about the Royal visit next year than the Prime Minister said when he announced it-that it will be an opportunity for Maori and Pakeha alike to express their loyalty to the Throne. But it is worth emphasising that the King and Queen are not coming to New Zealand to discover our loyalty,

to ask for it, or even to stimulate it. They are coming to receive it, and to give something in return. For loyalty is two-way or it is nothing. It is not something demanded of us and given grudgingly, though it may have been that once. It is something we give because it is there to be given, and there for no other purpose; something that exists only in being

given. In other words, the King is our king not by external authority or decree but by internal desire; because we wish it to be so. The proof of our loyalty in the constitutional sense is the fact that we have a king, since we are under no external compulsion to have one. We have one because We want one, and we can want one, as free people, only if the

bond between us is goodwill on both sides. It is no doubt true that the King is coming to strengthen that bond; but he is not coming ~because the bond is weak. He is coming because it is already so strong that the desire for a closer relationship is active on both sides, The King is a man and the Queen a woman. They are of the same human stuff as their subjects, with the same need to exchange emo-

tions to keep them healthy. We want to see them in the flesh and not merely in photographs and print. They want to see us so that they may go away feeling ‘that what they have left behind in New Zealand are loyal and friendly men and women and not merely a million-and-three-quarter subjects.