THE ELECTOR ENTHRONED.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 269, 13 November 1928, Page 6

THE ELECTOR ENTHRONED.

To-morrow is the people's Day of Judgment. Demos, for a little space, will be crowned with honour and sceptred with terror. When the polling booths are opened throughout New Zealand the issue of another political struggle will rest for a few fateful hours in the hands of the people. No more the shouting and the tumult; the duet of battle will have cleared. The last hustings speech will have been made, the last appealing advertisement published, and the last canvassing plea spoken. Four weeks of hurly-burly will be but a memory. AH save a handful of candidates —those fortunate few with a majority of three thousand or more at the last general election— will spend an anxious, exhausting day awaiting the inexorable decree of the electors. Party leaders will be much in the position of opposing field-marshals, far behind the trenches, trembling on the result of the battle, to which so much time and energy have been devoted in preparation.

People's day indeed is this, with the humble elector enthroned, all "powerful, with no man to bid him nay. On this day the people rule "themselves, virtually, by their choice of Parliamentary representatives. No longer do they go, cap in hand, seeking Ministerial audiences. The very Cabinet that they have approached with requests for this and that depends upon their favour for its continuance. For three years the mighty have sat in high places, have, it may be, flouted the wishes of the people. Now comes the Day of Reckoning. On this day, if they will, the poor, too long turned empty away, may take vengeance and put down the Government from its exalted place. No king on his throne has the authority of the humble elector, who, in the momentous act of casting his vote, is monarch of all he surveys. The polling booth is his regal castle, the screened cubicle his throne room, the stump of pencil his sceptre, the ballot paper his edict, the ballot box the herald that promulgates his decree. The impotent critic, the grumbler, for three years as a voice crying in the wilderness, is elevated to a dictatorship. The birthright of grumbling pales to insignificance in the full right of citizenship. It was not always so. Only one hundred years ago the franchise was restricted to land owners, and those without a "stake" in the country were voteless. It is no light thing, this electoral right. Yet some will treat it lightly. To some it will mean so little that they will not trouble to vote. They will let their right go by default. If such should suffer by the operation of bad or indifferent laws it would surely be their just recompense. Others there be, holding their privilege as of trifling worth, who will exercise the vote without thought or care. Happily these flippant fools are in the minority.

And some will blunder. Why so many invalid votes in a country where all. can read ? That many will blunder in the political sense is another certainty, although the "blunder" can be judged only from a personal and party angle. Young New Zealanders accept the franchise in the offhand manner characteristic of the casual colonial. The vote is a right—like free primary education. The pity of it is that the history books do not tell more of the long struggle, starting in 1429, to give democratic government to His Majesty's subjects. We have inherited a wonderful privilege. Had we been compelled to for it ourselves it would be held in greater I estimation. —G.C.P.W.