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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1935. Volume 6. Number 14.

Our First Prime Minister

Our First Prime Minister.

Miss C. S. Forde was the last of the trio, and she gripped her audience from the first word. Her composition was poetic and imaginative in construction, tending perhaps in places a little to over-statement; but the figure of John Edward Fitzgerald, that first New Zealand Prime Minister, with "a song upon his lips to encourage and inspire and a lantern in his hand to light the way," stood forth clearly before her hearers. We seem to have heard the phrase "pregnant with celestial fire" before. Can it be three years ago now? Keenly sympathetic was her treatment of her hero's last years, till "God's finger touched him and he slept," and moving was the apostrophe to the dead which provided her with a fine conclusion.

The judges then put their heads together, and Mr. Tahiwi was the unlucky one.