THE NEW ZEALAND LEGION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21952, 13 May 1933, Page 12

THE NEW ZEALAND LEGION.

The organisers of the New Zealand Legion have no reason to complain of a lack of public interest in their activities. The attendance at the meeting at the Town Hall on Thursday evening was an indication of the drawing power of this recently-inaugurated movement. For the attractions of anything that savours of novelty due allowance may be made, but it is apparent that the Legion has already exerted a very considerable appeal on the popular imagination. Upon its ability to continue to do so, and to enlarge its appeal, must depend, of course, its prospects of exercising a definite influence in the community. The old sentiment anent the time being ripe, and rotten ripe, for change, is widely enough echoed in these days, and the changes advocated are many, and some of them startling. The Legion is, for its part, interested in bringing about changes, but not of any alarming kind. The change it chiefly aims at is better government for the country by the removal of present obstacles to good government. That is surely an objective in which everybody ought to bo able to support it. Of course, the most intolerant of party adherents may say that he is himself pointing the way of better government, but his conception of good government will be different from that entertained by the Legion. It is the effect of party in producing government along the lines of political expediency that the Legion is desirous of counteracting, and for its intervention it has already made out a strong ease. That the movement which it represents is firmly based on patriotism and loyalty should constitute its first wide appeal. It puts the country first, and desires to ensure that in the administration of its affairs there

shall be an elimination of all those conflicts of sectional interests, and those pressures that tie the hands of legislators, by reason of which the vision of a sound national policy is obscured. The Legion would lift the government of the country out of the party ruts into which it has subsided. The principles for which it stands are based upon general considerations of a common-sense character, which have not lacked enunciation in the past. It is in the endeavour to mobilise public opinion in support of these principles that the Legion hopes to achieve something definite. It is sufficiently apparent that it is giving expression to views which accord with the sentiments of a large body of thinking citizens. Its aim is to mould public opinion so far as it is undetermined and stimulate it so far as it is apathetic. The Legion would stop the drift which is an outcome of the effect of divided interests and discord upon the political machine. It would arouse a wider interest in the affairs of the State and in the management of them. The Legion has been defined as just an organisation of the sane people in the community. The definition may be objected to in some quarters, but the Legion has its answer. Certainly, as Mr Campbell Begg has urged, there can be no solution of the country’s troubles in setting class against class and if, as he says, the Legion is going to force the sacrifice of party to the general welfare, it can only be on grounds of party argument as to what constitutes the general welfare that fault can be found with its objective. The Legion is on solid ground in its criticism of the way in which the efficiency of Parliament is weakened by the pressures to which its members are subjected in their representative capacity. The movement which the Legion represents is spreading, and if it continues to do so, and to influence the public mind throughout New Zealand, it may prove of very considerable value to the whole community by reason of the ideals which it is inculcating in the minds of those who are attracted to its standard. If the Legion can help to ensure merely that those who represent the community in Parliament are chosen on the basis of high qualifications, it will not have been founded in vain.