PEOPLE MUST LEARN VALUE OF LIBERTY

Northern Advocate, 30 March 1938, Page 7

PEOPLE MUST LEARN VALUE OF LIBERTY

—PROFESSOR ALGIE

[Special, to "Northern Advocate” J AUCKLAND. This Day. A deliberate and conscious effort through education to make people realise the actual value of liberty was 1 advocated last night by Mr R. M. I Algie. as being the best way to avoid S the evils of the suppression of inj dividual liberty, as- had happened in the totalitarian States. The speaker i was giving an address to the Workers’ j Educational Association on the , “Chad- ; lunge to Freedom.” j Mr Algio.’s address covered a wide j field. He reviewed a world situation j and world tendencies, and discussed j causes and the effects on the individj ual. ! Liberty Being Threatened. j It was on the last atjpect that he i concentrated. In his remarks he inI eluded conditions as he saw them in in the Dominion, but his reference to New Zealand was merely incidental to the wider problems. Liberty, as generally understood, he said, was being threatened both in the New and Old Worlds, and he had found it hard in the few months he had been away from the Auckland University College to awaken the minds of New Zealanders to a realisation of what the loss of liberty would mean.' He took each European country and America in turn, and said that in all these countries liberty was under a threat. Even New Zealand legislation in the past decade, and particularly in the past two years, had seen a reduction in liberty.

Germany and Italy. Mr Algie spoke a good deal of Germany and Italy, because he said he knew those countries both fairly well. In Germany, individual freedom had ben almost annihilated. There were religious and racial persecutions. Education had been replaced by propaganda, and the system of justice had deteriorated in Italy. He had been told by a professor of one particular division of history at the University of Rome that that professor had been instructed to give his teachings a particular bias.