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Otago Daily Times, Issue 19530, 13 July 1925, Page 6

THE SOCIALISTS’ POSITION. Mb Holland may be credited with perfect sincerity when he said in the House of Representatives on Friday night, in explanation of the votes which his supporters were about to give, that there was no member with whom they would less prefer to vote than with Mr Atmore. There is no member in the House who is more competent than Mr Atmore is to lay bare the fallacies of the Socialist party’s programme and to expose to public view the political tergiversations of the leaders of the party. There is not a more incisive speaker in the House, and his study both of the history of the Socialist movement and of economic questions make him a critic before whom Mr Holland and his colleagues stand in some degree of awe. It will probably have been observed that the Socialists made no attempt on Friday night to reply to the indictment which Mr Atmore hurled against them. Instead, they feebly sought to draw red herrings across the track. They dug up utterances by Mr Atmore when his investigations of social and economic problems seems to have been less complete than they now are, and they made insinuations of lack of patriotism on his part based on the circumstances that, a married man of 44 years of age when the Great War broke out, he did not enlist for active service. The suggestion that Mr Atmore had, like some men prominent in the Labour-Socialist circles, who were of military age at the time of the war, shirked his obligation, fell heavily to the ground. Moreover, if the parliamentary time limit had permitted him to do so, Mr Atmore, to whom the Socialists incautiously, by proposing an amendment of his own amendment' to the Address-in-Reply, conceded the right of a second speech, might have effectively quoted from speeches by Mr Holland, Mr Fraser, and other acknowledged leaders of the Socialist party during the war period. The whole tone of the public speeches of the members of the party is very different now from what it was at that time and in pre-war days. Their platform deliverances are no longer so violently coloured as they were then. The modification of the terms they employ in public is a compliment to the working class sentiment, which they have discovered to be out of sympathy with the wild Republicanism which their leaders used to preach. Their party organ, which was wont to sneer at “the Hempire,” as it was pleased to call the commonwealth of British nations, has submitted also to the need dictated by expediency. It might almost be supposed from the public speeches of the members of the Socialist party that every on© of them was as earnest in respect of loyalty to the Crown and devotion to the Empire as any section of the community could be and, as it is only fair to admit, some few of their number in Parliament

hare shown themselves to be. But little incidents, of occasional occurrence, of s, kind to which Mr Atmore referred on Friday night, will not have escaped the notice of a discerning public. They serve to throw a light searching enough to penetrate the disguises which some of the prominent members of the Socialist party would seem to have taken to wearing.