People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1897 — Sir Henry Parkes on His Early Years. [ARTICLE]

Sir Henry Parkes on His Early Years.

The Australian mail brings the announcement of the publication of the first of the three lives of the late Sir Henry Parkes that were known to be in active preparation. It is by Mr. Charles Lyne, who was the private secretary and trusted confident of Sir Henry for many years. He was designated as his biographer by Sir Henry himself, who, indeed, read and revised a portion of the book in its manuscript form. One day during one of his Premiershlps Sir Henry was reading a re-cently-published life of Mr. Gladstone, and, laying down the volume for a moment, he said to Mr. Lyne: “I was thinking when reading it of a comparison between Mr. Gladstone’s life and my own. When he was at Eton, preparing himself for Oxford, enjoying all the advantages of a good education, with plenty of money, and being trained in every way for his future position as a statesman, I was working on a rope-walk at 4d a day, and suffered such cruel treatment that I was knocked down with a crowbar, and did not recover my senses for half an hour. From the rope-walk I went to labor in a brick yard, where I was again brutally used, and when Mr. Gladstone was at Oxford I was breaking stones on the Queen’s highway with hardly enough clothing to protect me from the cold.” Truly a striking and dramatic contrast between the early years of two Prime Ministers.