BASIS OF DEMOCRACY SELF-DISCIPLINE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 264, 4 August 1937, Page 10

BASIS OF DEMOCRACY SELF-DISCIPLINE

Address by Hon. W. E. Barnard By Telegraph—Press Association Napier, August 3. “If we arc to retain our democratic right of liberty in New Zealand, all sections of the people must be prepared to impose voluntary discipline upon themselves —and that applies equally to farmer, wage-earner and business man alike,” observed the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. W. E. Barnard, in addressing electors in Napier this evening. Mr. Barnard said that under dictatorships people were under subjection and no upheaval or breakaway seemed possible. Under democracy the position was different. Discipline was not imposed from above, but must be developed from within the individual and voluntarily accepted. If that discipline broke down, say through large-scale lock-outs by employers or wholesale strikes by workerj in defiance of the law as it stood, democracy was at once endangered and might even fail altogether. '“We must set our faces against theories of class war. Opposing factions must remember that while there is room for difference of opinion—political economic and religious—we must be prepared to concede to other sections of the people than our own particular one the right to share fully and freely in the social, economic and cultural wealth of the country,” Mr. Barnard said.