MR. MACDONALD'S LATEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 32, 8 February 1928, Page 6

MR. MACDONALD'S LATEST.

Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald is a man of acknowledged ability, whether we regard him as a statesman or an "intellectual." But he is afflicted by a singularly defective political judgment, which impels him into strange mistakes, and when he is engaged in "playing politics" his instincts frequently lead him far astray. He has coupled complimentary references to Germany's handling of the Russian problem with a vehement attack on the British Conservatives for breaking off relations with Russia. Yet surely whatever the Germans may think, Mr. Mac Donald does not expect the British nation to forget that he himself, as head of a Labour Government, solemnly warned the Soviet State that if the Bolsheviks persisted with their revolutionary propaganda in Britain relations between the two countries must cease. How, then, can he with any reason blame his opponents for doing precisely what he threatened to do when they believed that they had sufficient evidence to justify their action?

The grotesque inconsistency of alk this is manifest enough. But it is rendered all the more exasperating by Mr. Mac Donald's confident assertion of what he would have done for the peace of Europe, if lie had been permitted, by converting Russia from the error of her ways. It was his policy, he declares, "to help Russia back into line with the Labour movement of the rest of the world," and the fruits of th;it policy were to have been the inclusion of Russia in the League of Nations. Does Mr. Mac Donald actually believe that any arguments he could advance would ever induce the Bolsheviks to forswear Marxism, drop their "class war" propaganda, cease their preparations for the world revolution, and range themselves tamely under his own "petty bourgeois" banner ?