TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 81, 2 October 1929, Page 10

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Cabled information to-day reports a rather uncommon degree of stir in the Federal election campaign. At nomination stage, the temperature appears to be running higher than it did at last Federal election, and certainly higher than it did in the New Zealand General Election. Only a day or two before the poll the Reform Press writers in this country, m their final reviews of particular constituencies, adopted an almost uniform tone of "no change likely " Then came, the thunderbolt. So, if the law of contraries still holds good, it is just possible that the thundery atmosphere in Australia will produce no thunderbolts at all. There is so much heavy weather on the economic plane that the interests of the Commonwealth would be better served by the return of Mr. Bruce, who has certain ideas of radical reorganisation of tariff and industrial affairs,.than by the return of Labour which has no alternative to the present plan under which high protection and labour conditions force each other upwards. There can be no Sir Joseph Ward in the Commonwealth drama unless he be Mr. Hughes, and between the two there is a great aap

As President of the New .Zealand Farmers' Union—which has proved time and again that it is too multicoloured to take on a party complexion—and as a more or leas unclassified member of Parliament, Mr. W. J. Poison has not pleased all the farmers., It was from the beginning quite impossible that he could have pleased all the farmers. No archangel in the heavenly hierarchy could have done so, and Mr. Poison —who^ entered the Parliamentary arena Just as the corpses of two far-mer-Ministers dropped out of itmay view his failure without dismay. Some recognition of the tmreasonableness of expecting an independent member of Parliament to walk in line with a whole host of people who j cannot walk in line with one another is now dawning on the farming community, and those political farmers who have worked up an anti-Poison wave must be beginning to wonder whether they have not overdone it. Otago is a long way from Taranaki, but they see things fairly clearly down there, and the provincial executive of the Otago Farmers' Union is trying _to call a halt in the search for points in which the president has departed from the canons of the Farmers' Union. To still the Babel, Otago suggests that protests should go through the clearing-house of the Dominion Executive, which will thus be charged witli the responsibility of deciding whether the rural Mahomet is acting in accordance with the Farmers' Union Koran. In that case he will be quite safe, since the revered volume is capable of finding a text to cover any economic transaction from high protection to freetrade.

Russia, the enigma! Once again the conflict of evidence is conspicuously illustrated in to-day's cabled news. An apparently bona fide delegation of two miners, from a British colliery, came back with a sweeping condemnation of Russiancolliery conditions and Russian life in general, yet a secretary of a colliery company (secretary .also to Lord Melchett in Cardiff) now has a diametrically opposed story. He not only saw a well-clad Russia, but a Russia with people animated by national esprit de corps. Why a delegation of depressed British workers should see all the debits; and why a presumably well-paid, British official should see all the credits, we cannot pretend' to say. There is no reason to believe that the evidence is not honest. Yet all that it does is to confirm that condition of doubt that'has existed for a decade concerning the real Russia. The world knows a lot now about both the Poles and less than ever about the country that connects the Pacific Ocean with the Baltic and the Black Seas. Byrd is in the Antarctic with all kinds of scientific measuring instruments, but measurements of Russia show wide discrepancies. When will the collective life of the world's peoples be reduced to teifms of a common standard, for purposes of comparison? Civilisation seems to be on the way to understand everything except itself.

William B. Shearer does not seem to have run away from the limelight. He appears to have admitted divulging some British naval data, and to consider the action a claim to notice, possibly to merit. The following paragraph in the cabled report is somewhat' obscure :—

.Shearer said that he himself was for the American programme for parity with the British Navy, ana that if he had not been he would have been'with the British, who wanted 750,000 tons of cruisers.

Does this mean that Shearer would have stood for 750,000 tons of cruisers on eacli^side of the Atlantic if the United States Government had been inclined to find the money to build up to that tonnage? No doubt

the higher tonnage would have suited, the United States shipbuilding companies; but the United States Government wished (and wishes) to obtain parity at a less cost in money to itself. It* insistence on this point is based on motives of economy that cannot possibly appeal to anr-ament firms unless they are pleased to find a virtue in necessity. In his story of his final break with the United States shipbuilders— consequent on die displeasure of the United States Government—Mr. Shearer makes the story look almost melodramatic. The vice-president of the choicely-named Bethlehem Steel Corporation is supposed to have accused him of being a German spy. But use would Germany have had for a spy at the Geneva Conference? German armament firms had nothing to hope, and disarmed Germany had nothing to fear. a