THE MANA OF MAJORITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15664, 18 July 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE MANA OF MAJORITY.

BY TOai'KOA.

These are the days of the mana of Majority, that strange now fetish which lias been evolved by ever-practical men as a substitute for the rule of kings and the agreements of representatives. This Majority is popularly supposed to be infallible and final. It 13 assumed to be endowed with all tho attributes of supremacy with omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. To doubt it lis to Tie heretic; to deny it is to, bo infidel, and to laugh at it is to be guilty of the unpardonable sin. Not only what we are to pay, but also what wo aro to oat, drink, wear, and do, what we are to read, say and think, what wo aro to buy, sell, and give, what we are to work at, play .it and look at, are being solemnly set (bwn for us by Majority— in Auckland and New Zealand. Against its decisions there is no appeal; at least, that is the popular idea. Naturally, men and women aro like sheep, not so much in going astray, but in following one another blindly. A sheep stumbles and jumps to recover itself; every sheep that follows in a travelling mob jumps at the same spot. A woman sticks a feather at the back of her hat because some tired milliner wants to get to bed; and millions of women the wide world over hoist tho feather just to bo in the fashion. There is comparatively little initiation and an unlimited amount of imitation in human nature; wherein is the foundation of all tyranny, whether the tyranny is autocratic, aristocratic, democratic, oligarchic, bureaucratic, or what you will. Majority is the latest form of tyranny, and is to be seen in its springtime among us in Now Zealand. What will it be in its summer, and how will it bend to its fall?

Majority is tho very natural and obvious resort of unwieldly and unstable multitude of men imbued with the persuasion that one man is as good as another, and that everybody should have a voice in governing, when the multitude sots itself against old political forms which have become unworkable through being outgrown.

A million people are agitated by a discussion as to whether smoking is advantageous. The agitation develops. Parties are formed. Interests are excited. Prejudices are exaggerated. Passions are roused. The pulpits thunder. The newspapers are enlisted—if possible. The cry goes up that the Delphic oracle should bo consulted. Majority *> appealed to for a decision. To the polls, 0 Israel! Five hundred thousand and one vote that smoking be outlawed; four hundred and ninety-one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine vote that smoking bo not interfered with. As long as the mana of Majority holds smoking is doomed. It may be said that nobody proposes such a decree, but wait. He who lives longest will see most.

There was a time when Parliament held authority because it was supposed to be representative of the great national interests—in Britain, of the agricultural order, of the great commercial cities, of the great universities, of the knights and yeomen of the shires, and the burgesses of the' towns. Representation was a privilege. To be a member was to hold a great trust. How . well this system worked in its long centuries of virility we can see by the stamp it set upon the national history, by the greatness of the men who led the old English Parliaments, by the patience and the sacrifice by which they lifted a little kingdom to the van of human progress and the mastery of the world. To-day, parliaments are being dt> liberately moulded to represent majorities only; every " reform" is directed towards securing a closer count of heads. Doubtless we have progressed, and are progressing, but the end is not yet.

In the days of tho kings and in the days of the Great Parliaments Englishmen believed that they had inborn rights, and defied all authority to tamper with those rights. We hear of rebellion in Ulster, but four thousand armed yeomen of Huntingdon rode one day to London City to ask King Charles of the welfare of Hampden. We talk of religious liberty, of the right of free speech and of the rights of the press, but these liberties have been asserted for us by men who died for them, and men who fought for them—not as new inspirations or as extraordinary conceptions, but 'as being as much an Englishman's own as it belonged to the sun to rise and to the stars to shine. Tho old kings were powerful, but a line was drawn at which the authority of the King ceased to bind the loyal. The old parliaments were strong, but there was a great realm of national thought and action into which statute law could never be successfully carried. Resistance flamed as fast and as far against the encroachment of rulers as against the coming of the Armada. An Englishman's house was his castle, and an Englishman's rights were his own. Majority has not yet learned the lesson that all government is but a convention, and that those who would rule must tread warily among the tender toes of English ruled. Only a few years ago is was solemnly proposed in New Zealand, by a clause in the Second Ballot Act carried through the House of Representatives but promptly carved out by the much-abused Legislative Council, to make it criminal for a citizen to address a public meeting, or to publish any political matter during tho week between the ballots in any undecided electorate. The solo object was to save a little, trouble and expense to a handful of candidates; tho effect would have been to outlaw rights of speech and publiccation which aro in tho blood of free men. There we have in a nutshell a modern view of the power of Majority, of Parliaments based solely upon Majority. It is absolutism; absolutism pure and simple; absolutism unrestrained by any fear of resistance and unlimited by any sense of inherent right. Majority, like all fetishes, is worked by an interested group. The voting man or woman is persuaded that heread also "or she"—is divinely master of the situation, that he has been endowed with the self-government which is rightfully his own, that he is thus the equal of kings and the lord of parliament and the master of national destinies, that he is all-wise and all-powerful, and that whatever he does is right. Fudge, brethren, all fudge! He has to choose botween Smith and Jones when he doesn't want either, or to vote " yes" or " no" when ho doesn't mean either. And the wonder, the won- j tier of wonders, is not that we are governed ho badly, but that we get along so well. And the truth is that a free nation is a Samson, and that silly laws and stupid tyrannies are as green withes to bind it—unless you cut its hair. The virtue-carrying hair of our British Samson is in its determination to go on its own way, with its kings or against its kings, with its parliaments or against its parliaments, with Majority or against Majority, when its spirit moves. Always it has been thus; always it will be thus, until our freedoms die 3. If Majority, would keep its mana, if politicians would | have authority and governments bear rule, they must remember that every true British man knows in his innermost heart that his institutions are but his tools, that his political forms are but the instruments of his progress, and that if his tools and his instruments- are turned against him he can break them and remake them as he has done a hundred times before.