THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1925. THE ELECTION'S AFTERMATH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19171, 10 November 1925, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1925. THE ELECTION'S AFTERMATH.

Quite as revealing as their bearing during the election have beon the comments since made by some unsuccessful candidates. Instead of taking their defeat in a worthy and admirable spirit, they have sought to belittle with sneers the judgment against them. They wooed the electorate with sweet words so long as its approval was to be won. Its approval was withheld. Immediately, their ingratiating purr changed to a vicious snarl. Happily, there were many who took defeat without any show of resentment. This will be reckoned to them when next they offer themselves. But of these others,, whose venom has been incontinently displayed, the electorate will count itself well rid. They have added the finishing touch to. the justification of the public's refusal to trust them with Parliamentary privilege. Of course, no one asks that a defeated candidate should rejoice in rejection, nor even that he should forbear to minimise his failure. Human nature is human nature, even in an election candidate. But to set out, as some have done, on a wholesale vilification of opponents and of large numbers of the electors is not lightly to be pardoned. The public will find it particularly hard to forgive the contempt that has been heaped upon it as an ignorant herd, incapable of clear judgment and easily gulled One of Labour's defeated candidates, whose egotism gaily survived the sl\ock of polling day, blamed his fate upon hostile misrepresentation of his party's platform and objective. Another, of like mind, de dared that Labour must write its platform in words that would not permit of deliberate distortion. The plain facts are against them: their party's platform and objective were set down clearly, in cold print, and the meaning of them was all too manifest to be acceptable. Every new twist that Labour's spokesmen gave to the plain English of their tenets only served to make sensible electors disgusted with these shifts to hide the truth, and that disgust deepened with every day that brought the poll nearer. A little face-to-face contemplation of thes-? facts / would serve Labour better than studied efforts to evade them.

It is the farmer that has come in for most of Labour's superior contempt. "The average 'cocky' in the North," to quote Mr. A. S. Richards, rejected of Marsden, "is not an intelligent human being." That being so, in Mr. Richards' regard, he has obviously come to the conclusion not to risk his precious reputation among such despicable folk again as a candidate. They are "flats," and "clad mostly in rags and dirt." In even their whiskers he finds occasion of ridicule. Yet, before polling day, these were the electors whose good opinion Labour was openly out to win. What made this difference in a night? Nothing but the farmer's refusal to be cajoled by Labour's specious "usehold" land policy. Could the venting of spleen go further? Those who read Mr. Frank Colbeck's derisive references to the farmers of the Auckland Province will agree that it has gone further. As a display of childish vexation, the comments of this protagonist of the Country Party are, indeed, hard to match with anything any election has produced. Like Mr. Richards, he has evidently done with attempts to intrigue the support of the farming community —so ignorant and "green" he deems it to be. Writing more in anger than in sorrow, he verges on the blasphemous, as does Mr. Richards in his description of "His Lordship Gordon Coates, saviour of mankind." The farmers of the province, as they read his opinion of them, will be more than ever satisfied that they refused to be misled by him and other members of his party. Sneers of this order are cheap, but they should cause those who so freely indulge in them the loss of whatever respect and confidence they could earlier have hoped to claim.

The chief condemnation of these sneers, however, is not that they are undignified and vulgar. It is that they are shamefully untrue. The farmers of this country may well resent the sweeping charge that they are brainless. Such a charge reflects only upon those who make it. The average intelligence of the country folk of this Dominion is at least as high as that of the denizens of its towns. Indeed, here as elsewhere in the world, the rural areas present conditions favouring independence of thought, whereas the towns tend, in Tennyson's phrase, to become social mills in which individual angles are rubbed down and "the picturesque of man and man" is merged in "form and gloss." ft would go ill with the Dominion, mainly dependent on its pastoral and agricultural industries, if its urban dwellers had a monopoly of intelligence, as these disgruntled candidates maintain. But the despisers of the farmers—now that the election is over and they have nothing to loso immediately by unmasking their contempt —have not been conspicuous for truthfulness in the campaign. "People could not live," said one of them "on such sentiment as 'Coates and Confidence,' but only on bread and butter." The implication of this is that bis party, Labour, was out to get a subsistence for the people, denied by the present regime. That was one of Labour's catch-cries in the campaign. It was determined to protect the under-dog, it declared, to stop exploitation of the wageearner, to lift the people out of the direful state of affairs into which private enterprise had plunged them. Its declaration was not believed, as

the poll's results proved. It was known to be baaed upon falsehood. The Dominion's people, as a whole, are not ignorant of the rest of the w«-<rld, and they know that, compared with other countries, New Zealand enjoys conditions of life second to none. So the catch-cry failed, and in their chagrin those who manufactured it have been led to insult others declining to be duped by it. In refreshing contrast to their fomenting of class hatred is Mr. Coates' urging that all should get together in an effort to make the most of the Dominion's opportunities.