"THE OLD PARTY "IN TROUBLE

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1213, 23 August 1911, Page 4

"THE OLD PARTY "IN TROUBLE

In a message which we printed yesterday our Christchurch correspondent referred to the attempts being made by our Ministerialist friends to explain away the 3106 votes given to Mr. J. D. Hall at the recent _ by-election in' Christchurch, and disposed of some of their fictions pretty completely. He did not mention, as he- might; have done, a still stronger piece of evidence: that the support given to Mr. Hall is a source of anxiety to the other side. The Christchurch organ of the Ministry, for example, is indignant with The' Dominion for feeling rather cheerful, and is endeavouring to assure us that we ought to feel extremely depressed. To do our contemporary justice it attempts a sort of discussion of the factors that gave Mk. Hall his 3103 votes, but, we simply cannot follow its reasoning. Of course we should like to have seen Mr. Hall victorious, but like most people we know that the "sympathy vote" begged for by his 'opponent would tip the scale, especially as care was taken to hurry the election forward lest the sympathy might cool. _At the same time it is really quite impossible for us to feel as depressed as our contemporary pretends to think we ought to be; since we feel quite certain that those good-natured people of various parties who voted simply out of a mistaken, but quite admirable, idea that they were paying a tributo to the late. Mr. Taylor by voting for. Mr, Ism will consider, in November next, and rightly consider, that their obligation in this respect has been discharged. As a matter of fact, the Christchurch paper is, as we have said, quite uneasy, and shows it quite plainly in_ its concluding sentence. This is significant enough to deserve reproduction:

Thosa Liberals who arc.in revolt against the Government arc not going to turn towards the Conservatives for the reforms they arc seeking, but arc going to elect representatives to Parliament who will either infuse more life into the old party or form a new one that at least will make an effort to giro them what they require. Wc want no stronger confession than this of the extent to which the country has wearied of "the old party" (which is a very useful phrase, worth remembering). With half the country sick of the old party's methods and loss of principles, and a good section of the other half in revolt against it to the point of considering a third party, "the old party's" prospects of further prolonging ite tenure of office cannot he particularly good. In the same article our contemporary asserts that the Reform vote can be defeated anywhere by a combination of the Radical and Prohibition votes. It is not worth while discussing such a proposition, because nothing is more certain than that "the old party," which is ready in its present decayed condition, and its desperate -desire to continue in office a little longer, to bid for any vote, is distrusted and disliked as strongly by the Prohibitionists as by anv other section of the community."