MR. MASSEY'S SPEECH.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 43, 19 February 1908, Page 7

MR. MASSEY'S SPEECH.

(By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) | WELLINGTON, this day. The '■ Post,' , commenting editorially i»on Mr. Massey's speech at Pukekohe, •■-ys: —"Though the Opposition party may derive moral support from Saturday's meeting. It is impossible to say that either they or the country can find much intellectual guidance in it. The main burden of the speeches was not even the oid familiar cry for the freehold, which has at least the merit of being something positive, but the new barren negative watchword of anti-socialism. Socialism i≤ a bogey which has attained large proportions on Australian soil, and Mr. Massey would be much wiser to treat it as an exotic, which, having attained but a dubious success in the land of its birth and in the hands of so expert a bogey man a≤ Mr. George Reid, is doomed to utter failure when presented by iar inferior artists to the common sense of the people of New Zealand. As for the futuTe, Mr. Massey declared that "He wanted this country to become what it was intended to be—one of the fairest and freest on God's earth, where there should be no extreme of wealth or pov erty." Yet Mr. Massey must know as well as we do that it is only by the paternal State interference, which it now suits him to denounce as soeiali-jm, that such a result can be secured. Till jLr. Massey takes office he is not called upon to propound elaborate details of his programme, but we ought to have at once some better index of what he intends than the vague negations in which he indulged in on Saturday."