The Evening Star TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1932. MR STEWART AND OTTAWA.

Evening Star, Issue 21290, 20 December 1932, Page 8

The Evening Star TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1932. MR STEWART AND OTTAWA.

The gathering of manufacturers, business men, and others who welcomed him back to Dunedin last night earned appreciation for themselves by their ability to appreciate Mr Downie Stewart. Sustained appreciation for a politician is not easy. It is sufficient for him to merit it to receive it, as countless histories show. Especially is it difficult in ages of disillusionment, which make disparagement the most natural tendency, and in times of obscure, not shining difficulties, which put the greatest strain on leaders. It is another disadvantage when a leader is too seldom in the public gaze. Mr Downie Stewart has been physically disqualified from mixing on all occasions with his constituents. He has been disqualified by another cause. Duuedin for a long time past has elected two members among its representatives who have been too important to the dominion as a whole to be always at the call of their immediate supporters. Sir Charles Statham has been limited, on certain crucial occasions when he comes before them, by his high office of the Speakership. Mr Stewart has had to move recently on a still wider stage, Which has removed him for long periods out of view. A year ago he was in Honolulu, arranging a trade treaty with Canada. Since then he has been at Ottawa and in London, doing New Zealand’s work and Dunedin’s work. Through no fault of his own, it is little this city has seen of him this year. Hence the “ welcome homo ” that was given to him last night. Mr Hogg, in his opening remarks at this non-political gathering, recalled the saying that a prophet has no honour in his own country. That, as he inferred, would be grotesquely without relevance to Mr Stewart and New Zealand. Outside bis own constituency

there is no politician who is admired and honoured more. And last evening’s gathering, in which a wide variety of local bodies and all political views were represented, was sufficient evidence of the appreciation which is felt for him in his own town. The appreciation might be more, at times, if Mr Stewart could be more downright and dramatic. But then it would be more spasmodic, more subject to revulsions, and, calling for less discernment, it would reflect less credit upon those who feel it. It was certainly a masterly address which, in his quiet manner, the Finance Minister, gave last night on his Ottawa and London missions. In surveying all the complications of present economic troubles, the difficulty most often is to see the wood for trees. Mr Stewart made his hearers see both. His' survey of the growth and the contraction of international trade, which makes the matter of our present discontents, and for which it was hardly necessary for him to say on an earlier occasion that ho has brought back no magic cure, was lucid in an extreme degree. His tribute to the broad-minded outlook on fiscal rearrangements at Ottawa which was taken from the first by New Zealand manufacturers was well deserved. That they had nothing to fear from them was the result of the fiscal policy always followed by this country, which, avoiding extremes of protection, has given more x - eal preferences to Great Britain than any others. As the Minister responsible for the last two tariff revisions, covering a period of ten years, he might fairly have claimed the chief credit for that policy. Joined with his other policy, while prosperity still smiled on us, of tapering off borrowing, which a British expert acclaimed as something too sound ever to be appreciated by a democracy, that makes no record to be ashamed of. The tapering off would have been better if it had been much sharper, a vigorous scaling down; but a Finance Minister is not the Government, he cannot control all his colleagues, and the democracy at that time had no fears for the morrow.

When he publishes his ‘ Cheerful Yesterdays ’ some good stories, which it is too soon now to print, but which added very pleasantly to the variety of Mr Stewart’s address, will no doubt see tho light. We would only refer now to his call for co-operation of all classes in tho difficulties that require a common front, his defence of the farmer against some too invidious judgments that at times can be the accompaniment of his misfortunes, and his warning against “ hysterical rumours and wild reports that are so apt to meet with credence while the public are highly strung and nervy.” Everyone must have heard the rumours which he denounced as mythical. They can be put now out of mind. No bad news has been brought back from London to be revealed at a later time. Our troubles are as bad as everyone sees and knows them to be, but, to the knowledge gf the Government, they are not worse. This is not the first depression by a few hundreds that tho world has known, and wo shall win through it as the others have been surmounted. Already Mr Stewart sees, and is not alone in seeing,_ some good things emerging from it in its influence on the national character. When those become more general and more confirmed it may be worth its cost.