DICTATORSHIP AND LIBERTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 128, 2 June 1931, Page 6

DICTATORSHIP AND LIBERTY.

It is impossible at this stage and distance to judge the rights and wrongs of the dispute between the Italian Government and the Vatican, which has come so soon after the bridging of the long-standing difference between the parties, but a sentence in the news may profitably be commented upon. "Fascists allege that the (Action) Society has placed itself in direct opposition to the State, since political parties, apart from the Fascists, are not allowed in Italy." Here is the price that is paid for dictatorship. Visitors to Italy notice the smoother running of the trains, tauter discipline among the people, signs of greater •efficiency everywhere, and they praise the political system that has wrought these improvements. British people, surveying ceaseless party strife and its resultant waste and muddle, occasionally sigh for a Mussolini. Sometimes they sigh in print. They should reflect \that if they achieved a Mussolini, however much they might wish to change him, they would have to keep their thoughts very much to themselves. Mazzini, one of the founders of United Italy, was arrested for thinking dangerously, and now the inheritors of the kingdom that he and Garibaldi and Cavour and Victor Emanuel freed from Austrian and Bourbon rule in the name of liberty and democracy, have adopted just the same attitude towards freedom of thought as that which drove Mazzini into exile. It is the same in Russia. There is only'one political party and one Press. It never seems to strike some friends of Russia in this country how well off they are in this respect; but perhaps they do not value freedom. Those who do should note that it is incompatible with dictatorship.