MR BALFOUR’S CONVERSION

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7301, 3 December 1910, Page 4

MR BALFOUR’S CONVERSION

Tho suddenness and fine affectation of enthusiasm with which Mr Balfour aid his followers have accepted the referendum principle curiously recalls the stories told of the 11 rice Christians ’ of China, who make their appearance in times of famine. Will) the Celestial conversion is, of course, prompted by t re pangs of hunger, the hope of bodily solace from the mission house nee store accompanying formal of the faith of the previously despised loreigners. If a few months ago, even a few weeks ago, Mr Balfour or Lord Curzon had been asked their opinion upon the referendum, the. former would probably have indulged in a lengthy and somewhat vague discourse, the purport of which would have been that as tue referendum had not Been known to a certain Elizabethan statesman it mast be regarded as a serious menace to gicat and wisely cherished constitutional principles, a departure from which might spell disaster to the Empire of which wo are all so proud, etc. Lord Curzon, in his now proverbial role of ‘ a. most superior purzon”—as the Oxford slang of his ’Varsity days put it-wou!d have made recondite references to an unwise imitation of Continental rxporiments utterly unsuitable to the temperament and character, and the organs of his party would have solemnly quoted the Trench plebiscite which- confirmed Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat, and twitted, with laboured humour, the advocates of “ this fatuous and futile nostrum." But circumstances alter cases. None know better than the Tory party organisers that their candidates are very seriously handicapped in the present struggle by the fact that they have ca “'y the coronets in their knapsacks, as Mi Harold Spencer recently remarked. They are .desperately afraid . that a political famine has overtaken their party, and with all the ready adaptability to altered conditions which marks the Chinese " rice Christian." they are now prepared to take np any and every political cry which they consider may lead them into the pleasant pastures, ot office and power. Mr Balfour’s conversion to Tariff Reform was that of a “ rice Christian," and his acceptance ot the referendum has Been governed by similar motives. It is vastly amusing to find the Tory leader, the champion of the hereditary principle, endeavouring to picture Mr Asquith objecting, to the people having tool much power. It is precisely because Mr Balfour and his supporters have feared and hated tho very idea of government by the people, through the people’s elected representatives, instead of government of the people by the House of Lords, that a general election has been necessary to vindicate the rights of the democracy against a tyrannous combination of a birth-proud aristocracy and a purseproud plutocracy. Tho sincerity of Mr Balfour’s conversion to what is, when elections are-car-ried out on a truly democratic basis, a democratic principle, can easily bo tested. Seeing that the Tory leader is apparently so anxious that "the people ” should decide the questions of tariff reform, Home Rule, and the power of the peers by means of a direct vote, he should lose no time in declaring his adherence to those methods by which alone ‘‘the* people" can really govern. A natural corollary, nay. a primary condition of the. referendum, must be tno abolition of plural voting, the holding of all elections on the same day, and manhood, and. if necessary, even womanhood suffrage.; Dnder the present system the voting strength of the Tory elector is enormously and most unfairly Superior to that of the middle class or artisan Liberal elector. The wealthy citizen, who frequently possesses, a property qualification in , half a dozen electorates, has only to jump into his motor-car and be whirled away to exercise his privilege six, times over, whereas the average Libefal, Radical, or Labour man has but one vote. The British electors are much less intelligent than'wo take them to be if- they accept Mr Balfour’s conversion as genuine, instead of being, as it palpably is, the last desperate throw of a political gambler wbo sees ruin staring him in , the face. Mr Balfour as a "rice Christian" is far more justly to be considered a "spectacle for angels to weep over"—the quotation is from a speech of his friend Lord Curzon, at Hull—than are the Liberals who object to a referendum without the; necessary, the logically inseparable accompaniment, of a genuinely democratic suffrage.