DISCIPLINE IN DEMOCRACY

Evening Star, Issue 22718, 4 August 1937, Page 2

DISCIPLINE IN DEMOCRACY

A VOLUNTARY SELF-CONTROL [Per United Press Association.] NAPIER, August “If we are 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 the farmer, the wage-earner, and the business man,” observed the Speaker of the House of Representatives (the 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 im-’ posed from above, but _ must be developed from within the individual and voluntarily accepted. If that discipline broke down, say, through large-scale lockouts by employers or wholesale strikes by workers in defiance of the law as it stood, democracy was at once endangered, and might even fail altogether. “We must set our faces against the theories of class war by opposing factious, remembering that while there is room for a 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 concluded.