Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/335

Rh politician. He saw the supreme importance of the welfare of the Empire,—an opportunist perhaps, yet in his sphere of power a great statesman. I write with special interest in him, as, in my goldfield days, Richard Seddon was one of my vestry-men in the little Miner's Church at Waimea, then unknown to fame,—originally an engineering mechanic, then miner, storekeeper, hotelkeeper. Then he qualified himself as a mining advocate, obtained a seat on the Westland County Council, and its chairmanship, at last winning his way into Parliament.

Do you remember one of Jowett's sermons at Oxford on "Religion and Politics?" After laying stress on the difficulty of combining the two, and the risk, which past history so fully illustrates, of Religious policy becoming Religious tyranny, he asks: "Is there no rule of right and wrong by which the Statesman must guide his steps, no true way in which morality and religion enter into politics? First of all he has the rule not to do anything as a statesman which as a private individual he would not allow himself to do. He will not flatter nor deceive, or confuse his own interests, or those of his party, with the interests of his country." This may be said to be an ideal of Statesmanship seldom attained. Seddon's political methods scarcely do so. As a man with men, in all his personal life I feel sure that he is perfectly straight; a true and constant friend, a genial comrade, with no trace of snobbery in his conduct; in spite of his success, blameless and happy in his family life, and in public life emphatically a man who realizes that the secret of good government is to govern. But he allows himself a political as well as a private conscience. He does not hesitate to avow the principle