Part 13 (2/2)
Cornish gold diggers of Bendigo and Ballarat rivalled the cordial welcome of the Welsh coal-miners of Westport and Greymouth. Catholic Irishmen newly arrived in cattle stations in Northern and Western Australia mustered as keenly in honour of the Prince as Presbyterian farmers in settled Tasmania. Fuzzy-headed Fijians, dignified Samoans, Polynesians of Honolulu, negroes of Demerara and Trinidad seethed and bubbled with like enthusiasm.
There was more than the personal factor in an appeal so widely honoured, more than the touch of romance upon imaginations untravelled along Royal roads, yet recollection harks back irresistibly to the spectacle of the human equation as between the Prince and his audiences. There is no other way of explaining their quick pleasure at the sight of him and their instant and unerring formulas for his relation to themselves and to the world. Anything mechanical, anything perfunctory, would have worn out with the first gratification of curiosity; but a point which struck the onlooker was that enthusiasm grew instead of cooling off, as the Prince's visit to each place continued and as acquaintance with him ripened. ”Yes, but only once,” was a little Australian girl's wistful answer when asked if she had seen the Prince. Nor were children of a larger growth content with only once. Their eyes could not be too well filled with this young symbol of their race and Empire, whose person pleased them and whose negligence of the pomp and privileges their minds had given him upset their preconceptions with a thrill of delight.
To be of the Imperial present, with its dignity and untarnished splendour, to come of the Royal past with its long discipline of duty and decoration of anointed names, and to let it all sink as the Prince lets it sink into the simplest background of his personality, is an achievement--or should it be called just a habit--which makes at once the happiest appeal to human nature, the world over. He does not even appear to be aware that these things should do anything for him. He is as diffident as, say, the naval officer who blocked Zeebrugge harbour or the flight-lieutenant who brought down the first Zeppelin over London.
The touch is British and of the essence. It is an odd inconsistency of race consciousness which makes us recognize and take pride in it, but we do. Another characteristic almost as immediately perceived by an audience is the Prince's plain delight in giving pleasure, his obvious satisfaction in doing the thing that he has to do and doing it well.
There are endless stories of his disregard of physical fatigue in the desire to take out of himself every ounce that could be given to the gratification of public gatherings. There is never a hint of boredom in his face or bearing. Thus the bond of sympathy is complete. The people are there and he is there for the same purpose, and nothing breaks the circuit of goodwill. There was something nave and touching in the constantly possessive note that hailed him ”ours” from the wharfs of Sydney to the string-bark avenues of Perth; and to this claim also something in the Prince responds with an unselfishness that might be the supreme lesson of kings.
The Prince's personality is greatly deepened and broadened by his speeches, which in their simplicity and directness are perfectly the expression of himself. They never exaggerate, and they never fall short.
They are pervaded by a sincerity that is perhaps more than anything the secret of their instant appeal. There is no forcing of the note, no effort at elaboration, no sacrifice to rhetorical points. Withal he says the things that people instinctively expect and want to hear, and he says them with a happy grace and a plain belief in the message that underlies them all, the a.s.surance of the strength and solidarity of the Empire for which he speaks.
The whole projection of this Royal personality upon the world is extraordinary. Look at the circ.u.mstances under which it is made. The pa.s.sionate under-trend of society towards the dogmas of democracy, the tragic extinction, within the last five years, of more than one dynasty, the perpetual tendency of privilege, royal as well as any other, to liquesce into the common stream of human rights, are all against him.
One would have supposed that roses strewn in the path of a Prince, at this point of the world's history, if strewn at all, would be none of nature's growing. Yet this Prince seems to prove that the King and the King's heir are far more a part of the people and bred from the nation, than any president. The Prince stands for the people. His character has been formed, his ideals fostered by healthy English training. It may possibly not be far-fetched to say that he is the product of intensive cultivation along national lines. Thus he appeals to the nation's pride of possession, and his place in their hearts is ready before he occupies it.
It is no depreciation of the personal magnetism of the Heir to the Throne to say that he brought to light and stimulated Imperial enthusiasm already existing below the surface, and waiting only to be evoked, rather than that he created anything not already in being.
Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the idea of the Empire as a union of sister nations co-operating and sharing ideals and hopes in a future they are bound together to bring about, is a young idea, as young as the Prince. It is not long since the Dominions and India had little beyond domestic affairs to exercise their powers of administration upon; their share in the Imperial idea was largely commercial, and chiefly concerned with the attraction of capital for the development of their natural resources. They had no voice in the world policy of the Anglo-Saxon race, and no apparent prospect of getting it. The Prince and his youth happily blend in the new partners.h.i.+p and the new prospect, making for all of us a very potential figure. Beside the charm, the buoyancy of youth, he has the romance of an epoch of world history full of possibilities for the peoples who live under the British flag. To this romance he contributes all that he is, and he contributes it in the most whole-hearted manner.
The Prince was never tired of referring in his speeches to the bond created by common service in the great war. Wherever he went it was the returned soldier that he must see and greet, wounded or whole--how often has this chronicle had to dwell upon the long lines of them. ”Returned sailors and soldiers, relations of the fallen, nurses and war-workers,”
backed by the shouting school-children--they have risen perhaps with some iteration before the eye of those who have followed the tale. But, looking back, the splendour fades out of the tropic sky and the opulence out of the great city, the whole panorama of sheep-run and factory, orchard and mine rolls up into a decoration; and the meaning of all we saw abides in those men and women and children working out their lot and their lives far from the home of the race, but standing, and ready to stand again, for its flag and its ideals.
”One heritage we share though seas divide,” declared the citizens of Sydney with the emphasis of a triumphal arch. The claim rang true.
Distance cannot weaken this tie, nor oceans wash it out. No one undervalues the picturesqueness of the emotion the Prince has evoked amongst members of other races living under Anglo-Saxon tutelage and protection, but the real significance is in what it has drawn from peoples of our own stock. Supreme among the values that come out of it is the enduring quality of the British portion in the things of the mind and of character, in ideals, and standards. It is no vague sentiment that binds together the various branches of our people, but a unity that lives. The part of the Prince of Wales has been to waken a new consciousness throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. He stands for all that joins us and for all that we can do when we are together.
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