The Press Friday, January 6, 1928. Mr Baldwin.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19201, 6 January 1928, Page 6

The Press Friday, January 6, 1928. Mr Baldwin.

In his New Year message to the Primrose League, cabled a few days ago, Mr Baldwin commented on the fact that 1928 would be a year of unusual activity, and warned the League that the policy measures of the Government would be subject to much misrepresentation. But if we may judge by the political comment contained in the English papers which have just arrived, a bewildering amount of misrepresentation is already going on, for Mr Baldwin is varyingly depicted as everything from a dangerous Radical to a j Tory of the deepest dye. There is to I hand, for instance, the full text of Mr | Wells's attack on the Baldwin Govern- ! ment, a cabled summary of which we printed some weeks ago. According to Mr Wells, Mr Baldwin -and his followers are truculent die-hards "waging a " social war at home" and abroad " carrying their support of the aggressive and reactionary dictatorship to " a pitch which amounts to a virtual " betrayal of both France and the " Republican regime in Germany." In the same hysterical style Mr Wells denounces the break with Russia and puts the whole responsibility for the failure of the Geneva Naval Conference on Mr Baldwin's shoulders. But when we turn to the editorial columns of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere's organ, we find " clarion-calls" like this: " How much longer will the rank-and-"file of the Conservative Party be " content to be led by a Socialist?—for " that is what Mr Baldwin undoubtedly "is." A day or two later we arc assured that the Prime Minister needs to be told plainly that his Socialistic achievements are gravely endangering the interests of his Party, of which he is the trustee, and that if he persists in his gratuitous folly he will prepare for his Party a crushing defeat at the polls, while one of the safeguards of our national prosperity and security will have been deliberately throw away. Here in New Zealand much of this is merely amusing, but it must be very puzzling to an honest elector in England. Unless Mr Baldwin is a political Jekyll-and-Hyde—and it is not easy to think of him as one—Lord Rothermere and Mr Wells have the gift of being able to see what they want to see.