Every Vote Counts.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19466, 13 November 1928, Page 10

Every Vote Counts.

We make no apology for insisting again to-day on the importance of the individual vote. Elections are won not by the people who support a Party but by those who vote for it. and every member of the Labour Party will vote. The Reform Party, on the other hand, has never at any time voted full strength, nor has it ever been organised to the last man and woman. No Party, before the arrival of Labour, was ever organised in that way, nor would it be easy to number off, register, and politically direct a Party whose members are simply the great body of moderate and independent citizens who vote as they feel inclined. The members of the Labour Party vote as soldiers fight—always under direction, and guarding against surprise. Nothing is left to chance, nor does any voter ever forget that he personally, though he has no individual liberty, is striking a blow for victory. The Labour voters over the whole Dominion three years ago numbered over 183,000. Three years before they numbered considerably less, and in 1919 only 139,000. No one supposes that in these six years the Party converted 44,000 people to a belief in Socialism, or even that 44,000 sons and, daughters of Socialists came of age and recorded their votes with their parents. The increase was due mainly to the work of organisation—partly among young people, partly among the rapidly deserting Liberals, partly among the outer fringes of the Party where there were still slackness and waste. Whether it is in the long run good for a Party or for the community to organise so thoroughly is not the question. The fact to be remembered is that it has been done, and that Labour will not lose 5 per cent, of its total voting strength to-morrow. Reform, just as certainly, has never voted within 25 per cent, of what the Labour leaders, if they were in charge, would call its strength, and that fact is of more importance at present than its proportionately greater accession of strength during the last six years. For although its strength increased between 1919 and 1925 four times as fast as Labour's, neither a relative nor an absolute increase is to b,e trusted three years later if nothing has happened the meantime to keep the Party on guard. Reform's danger, as we pointed out yesterday, is that it has beaten off all its attacks too easily. It is by far the strongest Party in the country, but to get that fact properly recorded it must poll something like its full strength in every electorate. In short, every elector everywhere who believes that it is desirable to preserve the pre-', sent social and industrial system must take the trouble to say so—to-morrow, on a voting paper, before seven in the evening in the cities and six in the country. Victory then will be certain, and it will be the kind of victory the situation demands.