MR DALLEY ON CONSULAR RESPONSIBILITIES.

Inangahua Times, Volume X, Issue 1562, 17 June 1885, Page 3

MR D ALLEY ON CONSULAR RESPONSIBILITIES.

I The annual consular dinner giyen in Sydney took place on the 27th ult, all the foreign consuls being present. Mr E. M. Paul, consul for Russia, was in the chair, and Dr Marano, consul for Italy, in the vice-chair. Arasng the company were the Chief Justice, Sir Alfred Stephen, and Mr Dalley the Attorney-general. Mr Dal ley, in responding to the toast of the " Ministry," remarked that nothing could be more beneficent, as well as pleasant, than that the consular representatives of the nations of the world in this great city should have frequent opportunities of knowing and respecting each other as much as possible, and thus increasing their individual efficiency in the services of their repective Governments, and benefiting the community in which their services were being discharged. He was well aware that although in the higher sense they had no great diplomatic functions to exercise, yet the marvellous development of the resources of these Colonies and the new Imperial policies of some of the great nations represented at that Board had given them a*n entirlej altered position in the eyes of European statesman — a change which had necessarily and immediately occasioned a corresponding increase of care and , responsibility on their part. In speaking of this increase of responsibility, he i allnded more especially to the obligation which was imposed upon them of refraining from any interference, to their own confusion and the peril of the Empire, in matters which were of Imperial policy, and to interfere with which might occasion Imperial embarrassment. They must be guarded in abstaining from pretensions which had no foundation in justice on their part, and which the statesmen of the empire wonld not, and indeed could not, for a moment sustain. Referring to the friendly feeling existing between Italy and England, MrDalley spoke as follows : — We have had a time of national trouble and sorrow almost unexampled in the latter periods of our English history. Tt was said that our great Empire, which had flung away her hundreds of millions, and ponred out her best blood through centuries for so many objects of her Imperial protection, stood at last before the world without an ally. She, it was said, stood alone — she whore alliances had been founded upon justice, formed for the triumph of right, sustained witl such waste of treasure, and crowned with such splendour of achievemenl -and hardly had the words beei spoken when the youngest, and ye oldest, the most graceful and mos chivalrous of nations, one to whicl: Europe was under deeper spiritna obligations than to all other peoples which had for her own protection am to maintain her new and restored plac* among the empires, surrounded hersel ; with ample means of defence, sprang to our sid« offered to us her sympathy her friendship, her children, and ha navy. Pardon mo, at the. feast of al nin- allit-s. if I presume to 3ingle ou

a that glorious Italian people, whose sovei reign (the Gordon of European mott- j ? archfe.) rode the other day into the city : I of pestilence and suffering with more ' i kingly dignity than ever graced the | i most splendid pageant, with whose | i re-established unity and restored greati ness of fortune England so deeply i sympathised, receiving so glorious a proof of national gratitude in return i for her sympathy and her love. ' '