ROUND TABLE CLUB.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 174, 24 July 1936, Page 11

ROUND TABLE CLUB.

TALK TO BUSINESS WOMEN. At the usual fortnightly meeting of the Auckland Business and Professional Women's Bound Table Club the speaker was the Rev. Kenneth Melvin, who took for his subject "The Outlook for Freedom." In India, Japan, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Austria and Germany, said the speaker, we have of late years seen thousands of people imprisoned and interned because of their opinions. Dictatorships had arrogated to - themselves a power over men's minds unprecedented in history; and it was a significant fact that wherever dictatorships existed the status of women was lowered. Liberty would appear to be closely bound up with democracy. The causes of the eclipse of liberty were in part the blindness of economic action, the growth of centralisation, the atmosphere of crisis, the clumsiness of the parliamentary machine and the evils ot the party system. Forces that strongly militated against the freedom of the individual were the creation of the mass mind by the system of popular education, and the dominntion of man's working nnd leifure hours by machinery.

The speaker dealt at length with the case for and the case against liberty — liberty of thought, of speech and of action; the necessary limitations to liberty; and the danger of unopposed power. "Only those must make the laws who have to obey them," said the speaker, "and those who obey them must have the right and means to have them altered .by public criticism and aroused conviction." Much might be done by a more adequate education for citizenship beginning in the schools with all children from 12 years onwards, so that they might have a more intelligent knowledge of civics and current history, politics and economics.