Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1906. AMERICAN STATE ELECTIONS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXII, Issue 7024, 12 November 1906, Page 2

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1906. AMERICAN STATE ELECTIONS.

vYithin the past week wild and whirling words have come to as from Amerioa concerning the New York State elections. It is not quite easy to get at the truth within or behind such messages, because they are tainted with the exaggeration whioh is apt to characterise extreme party warfare everywhere, and nowhere more than m America, where a licentiously exclamatory style has for many years bad possession of the public press. To judge by what comes to us through or from ordina/y American newspaper?, we might conclude that the country was m as | horrible a state as a decaying carcase, with j abominable maggots wriggling and crawl- ; ing m thousands around and about each other; but ware we to go to Amerioa itself, we should find people there muoh the same as those of any other country whose population is of British stock. In regard to party polities, America appears to be m a stage akin to that of England m the times of the later Stuart?, Queen Anne, and the first George; and were we to judge England by the ferooious pamphleteers of those days, we wouid know as little of the eenerallifeof the people as >we shall now do of the prevailing life of the Americans if we allow ourselves to be guided by the belching fulminations of average American newspapers. Even the cable messages lately received about the election for the Governorship of New York State have been of this sorry order. But perhaps this need not be wondered at, seeing that they must ha^e, primarily, taken shape and charaoter from the ferocity prevalent within the fighting area of the contestants—one the champion of things as they are, and the other of the municipal and national ownership of public utilities and of opposition to trusts and combine?. Yet there is no need to despair of the «;reat Republic. It is working out its salvation m its own way, and is still, from all we can learn, only m thit state of flux spoken of by its own great seer and laureate, Walt Whitman, when he says m his roughly oracular mannerHow America illustrates birth, eigantin youth, the promise, the sure fulfilment, despite of people—illustrates evil n.s well as good; How the whirl, the coa*bat, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding keep on and on; How society waits unformed, and is between things ended and things begun. The conditions thus indicated are so cosmic, andthescale on which they operate is so vast that there must needs be tumult and strife; and yet there is much less disorder and much more morality than wo shall ever realise, if we allow onr minds to be biassed by the wild extravagance of the average American newspaper, m ro far as it is a political partisan on either the DemI ocratio or the Republican side. Nowadays m British communities political partisanship is, comparatively, a thing of milk and water; but still were these colonies to be judged as communities by the outside world on the strength of what one political party says and writes of the other, the re- j suit would probably be, aa a picture m comparison with the general charaoter of the population, a luridly melodramatic extravanganza. Aba matter of fairness to Americans, as well as of respect for his own intelligence, the Australian and New Zealander should bear this m mind when circumstances invite him to give some thought to American affairs, as they have lately done m connection with the New York State elections.