The Life of King Henry the Eight • Paragraph 921
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After pointing out the nature of events in recent years, the growth of international friendships and new understandings and stronger safeguards for peace, together with the ever-tightening bonds of corporate unity within the British realms, Mr. Asquith went on to say that: "In all these multiform manifestations of national and Imperial life, the history of the world will assign a part of singular dignity to the great ruler Great Britain has lost. In external affairs King Edward's powerful influence was directed not only to the avoidance of war, but to the causes of and pretexts of war, and he well earned the title by which he will always be remembered, the Peace-maker of the World." Continuing, the Premier said, that within the boundaries of the Empire his late Majesty, by his broad and elastic sympathies, had won a degree of loyalty and affectionate confidence which few Sovereigns had ever enjoyed. "Here at home," he added, "all recognized that above the din and dust of their hard-fought controversies, detached from party, and attached only to the common interest, they had in the late King an arbiter ripe in experience, judicial in temper, and at once a reverent worshipper of their traditions, and a watchful guardian of their constitutional liberties." King Edward's life as a devotee of duty, as a sportsman in the best sense of the word, as an ardent and discriminating patron of the arts, as a good business man at the head of a great business community, possessed of intuitive shrewdness in the management of men and difficult situations, as a keen social reformer with "no self apart from his people," was then dwelt upon. It would be impossible in any limited space to analyze the views of the British press. The _Times_ declared that "his people loved him for his honesty and kindly courtesy. To all he was not merely every inch a King but every inch an English King and an English gentleman. His influence was not the same as that of Queen Victoria, but in some respects it was almost stronger." The _Daily Mail_ considered that "to his initiative his subjects and the Empire owe the pacification of South Africa and the final reconciliation with the Boers. The system of understandings with foreign powers which is our security to-day was in a great part his handiwork." To the Radical _Daily News_ he was "the supreme example of a people's King by common consent" and this the Liberal _Morning Leader_ echoed with a further tribute to "the sheer instinctive deference paid to his proved wisdom, his large-minded statesmanship, his unequaled knowledge of the world, and the tact that never failed him in the greatest or the least occasion."