Labour in New Zealand.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 17984, 30 January 1924, Page 8

Labour in New Zealand.

Labour in New Zealand must be a little embarrassed when it compares the strange speeches its leaders still make with the addresses delivered by leaders of the Labour. Party in Britain. The forty faithful souls, for example, who Were in "Woolston School on Monday evening "carried by acclamation" a vote of thanks to Mr L\ Mcllvride, M.P., and expressed enthusiastic approval of the statement of Mr HeCombs that Canterbury was privileged in securing such a speaker for a fortj night; but when the excitement that even forty people can give one another had passed, it must have occurred to most of them that they had been seduced by plain rubbish. Mr McHvride started off by saying that the Labour Party alone conld save the | country and the bnt it is not uncharitable to ask him which Empire. Until the other day, it was almost as much as a Labour leader ? 3 seat worth to mention the Empire, and to talk about it so bravely is cant of the worst kind. If it is the British Empire that Mr Mcllvride is now so anxious about, it geems necessary to remind him that the Party he supports has as a party done nothing for the British Empire. And what precisely did Mr Mcllvride mean by saying that "the cause of the Labour Party is the "cause of humanity"? If it is the cause of humanity to say what is untrue,* as he did in fyio ue?t hrpath, by saying that Mr Mass ay. believed "the

"prosperity of the big merchants and "traders to be the prosperity of the "country," then Labour certainly stands for humanity. The kindest thing we can eay ia that Mi MeUvrido really supposes that humanity and "the "people" are the same thing—the foolish people who listen to his tub" thumping—and that be sees no harm in throwing "the big merchants and "traders" at Mr Massey when f] 10

object is humanity's good, - And when he talks about abolishing the "capitalistic system" ju order *° e -<r ''man's inhumanity to man," he shows that ho has almost everything yet to learn of man, however much he may have pondered on inhumanity. If anybody knows how to abolish inhumanity—not excluding the political inhumanity of trumping up charges about opponents—the world has been waiting for him since mankind left its cave. But if our Labour agitators would go to a place called Russia, and see how the uprooting of capitalism lias ended inhumanity there, if thev would spend a year in the Solomon Islands and sco how gentle men are before capitalism has corrupted them, they would, we think, if they arc (is good friends of mankind as ihoy elaiiH to be, hesitnto before pi-eSCribing Socialism as the cure of selfishness, cruelty, and tyranny. Socialism, however, is a, delusion that the local Labour man shares with others: where Mr Mcllvride was really original on Monday night was when lie said that the Government, the year of the slump, spent £250,000 bringing people to the country for whom it knew there was neither shelter nor work, but whom it wanted for the purpose, and no other, of providing personnel for the war to-be in the East. Even the later statement that " Mic policy of Die Govern"ment was to keep unemployedis not as strong a proof of this Labour politician's bold imagination or of his independence of the tyrannous law. 1 ) of reason. It is a pity, however, that the Imperial Government should not know

how nian} f men we arc maintaining here from motives of such pure patriotism, and that the Woolston orator did. not round off his argument by showing how such a sacrifice conflicts with Labour's new zeal for the Empire.