WRECKERS PROFIT BY DISTRESS

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 32, 8 February 1922, Page 6

WRECKERS PROFIT BY DISTRESS

Economic reforms and political reforms are sometimes mutually dependent, and it is now the established thing for Labour to adopt political action as a means, of furthering both classes of reform. But it is a quite different thing to take advantage of a time of economic stress in order to transfer such political from constitutional channels to revolutionary channels. That is what Mr. Waterson is trying to do in South Africa. If the South African Labour Party is dissatisfied with the South African Parliament, the advice of a constitutional leader is to elect a better Parliament per medium of the ballot box. But Mr. Waterson and similar revolutionaries demand not a new election but a new Constitution, and one of republican character. They ,wish to overturn the Constitution to the extent of substituting a republic for a constitutional monarchy; and even if they achieved their aim, they would not rest content, because a- republic would not give them any broader electoral franchise than a monarchy can give. Under their republic they would still have to win an election, as now, before they could wield power. Their real objective, how-

ever, is to rule not as a majority but. as a minority, in_the way that, the Communist clique has ruled in Soviet -Russia, i Therefore the Wajiersons would be no more content with, a South African republic than the Russian Communists were content with the Kerensky republic. The Watersons ..would hurry on to the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat—really the dictatorship' ot a clique. But the South African Dutch as a whole are conservative and certainly not " sovietistic." South Africa also has some sane Labour sections that know h.ow barren a thing proletarian revolution is. The " mass civil disobedience " of Gandhi is equally'dangerous. The hope of the world lies not in wrecking but in building.