THE CENSURE MOTION

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 8681, 14 March 1914, Page 4

THE CENSURE MOTION

The defeat of .Sir J. Randles’ censure motion, which was aimed at the land policy of the Chancellor, is chiefly remarkable as showing that the policy of diversion is not profitable to the Tories. The expectation was that the diversion might relieve tho situation which is just now' dominated—subject to the limitations which we pointed out the other day—by the Irish question. But diversions, to be successful, must lead up the right roads. This led up the wrong road. On the land question tho Tory-Unionist position is just as weak as it is upon any other of the points cf policy placed before the public by the Liberal Government. The Liberal party is not going to rally round the landowners, whom it knows to be wrong, in order to hurt the Government on the Irish question, where it knows Ministers to bo right. The Unionist expectation that the Liberals would perpetrate one injustice in order to facilitate another is but the measure of the depths of ineptitude into which that party has fallen. The Chancellor, during the debate that gave such short shrift to the censure motion, showed his mastery of the subject by breaking new ground. He had, in the course of his brilliant, fervid campaign, exposed the incongruities of the subject, denounced the low rates and the high prices, made good the statement that values on which these freeholders batten are State-created, painted in their true colours the hideous evictions which have for all time disgraced certain prominent names. "With these he found, as he said during the debate, that at last he had roused-the nation. Why the monopolists wore roused no one need ask. The Lloyd George programme does not propose to buy them out at ruinous prices. That sort ot confiscation they 'were ready to welcome. But the. Chancellor’s proposal to make them carry out the present system according to justice has driven them out of their seven senses, so far that it is impossible for them to appreciate how absurd a diversion and how hopeless Sir John Randles had proposed for their consolation. .The Chancellor has added to their bewilderment by proving to them how greatly Mr Joseph 'Chamberlain, whom they have almost deified—Mr Chamberlain, the “ Blastus ” of the late Mr Stead’s early praises, and the “Judas” of his later scathing—had once conducted a campaign much on the lines of the Lloyd George speeches. In fact, the Chancellor has given proofs of the rottenness of their land position, which in their own eyes must be irrefragable. All this is instructive, as (1) a proof that the reaction against the worst land system in the world is going to be both severe and complete, and (2) a warning to other countries, notably this Dominion of New Zealand, against allowing such a system to get permanent hold, to the detriment of the general interest.