BEGINNING OF LIBERTY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 62, Issue 5, 17 October 1941, Page 4

BEGINNING OF LIBERTY.

The. beginning of liberty is to believe in people as individuals, with all their capacities for growth and intelligence in spite of their mistakes, yet always to challenge any man’s claim to complete knowledge of power, writes Mr Malcolm W. Davis in a report to an American Commission to study the organisation of peace. What, we call democracy' is the evidence in government of these principles, the expression of a people’s respect and responsibility for themselves. This is the groundwork of the world we want. Throughout the different representative States in the world, there appears this common idea of a people’s right to rule themselves. With the right go risks, because it includes a prerogative of rulers—the right to be wrong. So it implies that any majority will keep open for its opponents the public right to speak their minds, to organise parties and elect legislators, hnd in turn by persuasion to form a majority. The members of such a society guarantee to each other the privileges and the safeguards that they together want.