The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1935. THIS FREEDOM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1935. THIS FREEDOM.

Tor the cause thct lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in '.he distance, And the good that we oau da.

The spectacle of Italy reproving Abyssinia for its maintenance, of slavery, and putting this forward as an excuse for annexation, is not without its irony. The Emperor has retorted that slavery exists in two of Italy's three African colonies. The retort is not effective, because if it does exist there it may well be entirely against the wishes of the Italian Government, just as there is still a little slavery —or there was a few years ago —in corners of the British-governed Sudan. What would be much more effective from the mouth of the Lion of Judah would be a reference to the mental and spiritual servitude that Italian Fascism imposes. Italians are physically free, though even there an exception has to be noted in respect to the demands of the military machine, which begins with the child of eight, but they are certainly not free intellectually or politically. No Italian is free to criticise his Government. No opposition to Fascism is allowed in "Parliament. No one would be permitted to question the policy of Mussolini in Africa. And there may be some resemblance between the condition of slaves in Abyssinia, and that of political prisoners on certain Italian islands, of which grim stories are told.

" It is mostly because the British people value the freedom that is denied in Italy and other countries that Fascism and Communism have made so little headway in Britain. Yet there are some who argue that the wage-earner has no freedom —or as one of this class put it the other day, nothing but the freedom to starve. This remark is quoted in a recent consideration of the worker's liberty by Mr. John Moore, a mat-weaver of Bradford, who for ten years has been a member of the Workers' Educational Association. Not silenced by what one of his mates said, Mr. Moore proceeded to enumerate the directions in which the British worker was free. That the Labour Party had twice supplied a National Government, and that many of the large cities were under the control of workingclass representatives, illustrated the political freedom of the class. Through trade unions the right to collective bargaining was maintained, and it was good to feel that unions could go on building up reserve funds without the fear that at any moment they could be seized, as had been done in Germany and Austria. It may be added that even in the United States Labour has not yet won the British measure of the right of collective bargaining. In Britain the wage-earner has also the right to demonstrate collectively, a right denied his class in Italy and Germany. Mr. Moore cited the success of the co-operative movement as a product of freedom and ability; through it the wage-earner was free to develop to a very full extent the idea of coJlectivism in distribution as well as production. Social services, including facilities for education, had also tended to widen his freedom by adding to his facilities for enjoying life.

There is another kind of freedom that the Briton enjoys. He is not. compelled to be actively patriotic or to engage in social service against his will. He is free to interest himself in any movement or in none at all. "I mention this fact," says Mr. Moore, "because a German friend of mine recently complained to me in very bitter language that he had been compelled to devote several evenings a week to some sort of youth organisation with which he had nothing in common." One suspects that there is a good deal of resentment of this sort in Germany and Italy, but no one dares to express it. Behind the facade of cheering Fascists and Nazis, of carefully organised enthusiasm, there is a good deal of indifference, boredom

and stifled opposition. The Briton objects to being dragooned into good works, but there are in every age men and women who sincerely believe that such dragooning is good for their fellows, and these have to be watched. It must not be supposed, however, that Mr. Moore is simply what the Americans call a "stand-patter." He is far from satisfied with the lot of the wage-earner. He realises that economic freedom has lagged behind political, and he shows how potent is unemployment in destroying freedom. He believes *in more State intervention to redress the economic balance between the classes, and, unconsciously, it seems, he states a great problem of the future —how to reconcile such intervention with the freedom of the individual, "freedom to play his part as a useful and respected member of the community; freedom to raise his family according to the best traditions of our country . . . freedom in the last analysis to live what Aristotle called the 'good life,' that he may hand on to posterity a brighter and better heritage than he himself has known." In the meantime, his catalogue of the respects in which the Briton is free is well worth the setting forth. Conditions as patent as they are valuable are oft«n overlooked.