AWAY DOWN SOUTH.

Otago Witness, Issue 2686, 6 September 1905, Page 67

AWAY DOWN SOUTH.

DISSERTATIONS AND* SOME HYPOTHESES. (Otago Daily Times Special.) As the train swayed greasily round a. curve somewhere beyond Mataura, while all that rich weald of Southland lay tawny -golden in the sunset, the Political Specialist ceased to talk about the limitations of the narrow gauge and the besetting problems of curves and grades, and remounted hi 6 hobby with a whoop. " New Zealand," he said, "is the Land of Constant Increase; but all the credit is not due to Nature. Take the case of Southland. You see it to-day, prosperous, selfreliant/ stalwart to dare and do. Probably its 'future will be richer than our dreams. Well, the credit of that is almost as largely due to the race as to the coil. . The early settlers were ,of !o:ue Scottish grit and balance. They had few fads and no decorative theories, and all their ambitions were simple and^direci;^ they had no words of "servile compromise in their vocabularies. They set to work to pluck their fortunes from, the teeth of circumstance. They had no roads at all, mo "railways, no' bridges, none of the ordinary means of communication."- , They had no for the port of Blu'fi was still an established t bogey of the • master mariner. They had abundance, of land and superabundance of water. The land was boggy and often sour ; in place of "moisture there was- saturation. They set to,' and to-day the condition of things is as you, see. Nature is bounteous — and capricious ; one would not rob her_ of her proper honours. Still, you know, I like to say a word in praise of human enterprise." The Political Specialist— whose modesty is of such supsrsentitive delicacy that it is often tempted to -conceal v itself — also gave me to understand' that "while^Nature had done much ~for Southland, and while human enterprise had worked miracles, the honour and glory of these things was properly due to the Seddon Government. Pondering this pronouncement, I reached Invercargnl. The sky was clear at -Invercargill, and mellow points here' and' there already , heralded the coming glory of the stars; but there was -an ugly bite in the atmo- | sphere, and the place was like a damp'; barn full of Arctic draughts. In the hotel, facing the most creditable fire I had yet seen- in New - Zealand, I found comfort, and a deserving 'commercial, man gave, me a good" cigar and some more information. When I made mention" of the marvellous deeds of v the v Seddon Government he .snorted, and . when I talked of the unparalleled n human of'- Southland, he-jibed. " You'yebeen rooked," be said. "The fact of the' whole matter is that all this part of' the colony is naturally so fat and prolific, .that 'the place simply 'had .ta go ahead,- once it was properly started. The actual pioneers • did extraor din arily good work, I '-.grant' youi but that was before Seddon .liad" reached even the pothook stage of 'politics.' No Government couldspend the money Seddon has spent without accidentally -helping somebody, and I frankly admit that if Seddon were as little fallible " as he is modest he would be a paragon of -Premiers. For years the balance of power has been with the massed workers of the big towns, and Seddon, as .member for Seddon and the tribe of Seddon, lias given the workers whatever they' have wanted. ' Sometimes the workers' appetite has been good and wholesome ; sometimes, often, it has been the mere craving of the mob. for a new thing. Ballance.had set the democratic wave flowing, the people were caught, and lifted on the crest of the, new enthusiasm, and Seddon took advantage of the position. He gave them at tbeir bidding democracy nolus-bblus, neck or nothing. For 12 years he has been .filling this country up with every soft :of political patent medicine that the majority has craved for, and that extraordinarily "unscientific treatment of even the sturdiest patient is bound to tell disastrously in the end. We need a purge pretty badly just now. A country is like an- organism : it can only grow permanently, mature "and strong along lines of natural 'development. You can't safely help along evolution with gelignite. We have "rioted 'in. rash experiment; and because God has kept us prosperous in spite of ' our" "recklessness we are beginning to -think* that- our- recklessness has kept us prosperous in spite, of God. Seddon just af present-is like a"spoilt child, conscious of its misbehaviour. He's had his own way so long that when he gets a bump the shock will paralyse him." There were comments and mild objections liere ; but the Commercial Man, who was enjoying the rostrum hugely, gaA^e me, another cigar, and swept on. "Democracy is all right. lam a Democrat to the marrow. All New Zealanders' are Democrats more or less, with the exception of the congenital idiots. But- 1 tell -you that the Seddon policy is not democratic, never has been democratic, and is, in fact, opposed to the essential principles of true democracy. Seddon upholds and applauds in all things the tyranny of majorities. If he had a thousand and one self-seekers and scallywags at his back, he'd have a loudmouthed Seddonian contempt for any nine hundred and ninety-nine just persons. It 5s his fixed belief that when the majority Ss passably content the country is bowling along on the wings of the morning to some sort of unthinkable earthly paradise, where there shall be neither order nor restraint, 'but where, self-satisfied, the sons of men •hall wallow in eternal fat and live royally by taking in each other's washing. Even es an impossible dream, you know, that 'doesn't appeal to me. I like ideals that repay inspection, and smell healthy." .■ Here the Objector breaks in strenuously. 11 One moment," He says, " just to clear up a point. You spoke just now about the Premier relying on the majority of massed workers in the big towns. Won't that "*t<sjc-rity persist?" <

"Ah," said the Commercial Man, "the majority of the intellectually improvident will always persist in the big cities ; but in New Zealand it will ceaso to be the working majority of the electors. Seddon is in the way of being hoist with his own petard. In order to keep himself in the full glare of the limelight he has happily had to keep on doing something! Among other things, he has given all sorts of assistance to small settlers. Now, these small landholders will surely develop into the most critical and cautious class in the colony ; just as, regarded as reproductive units, they will surely be the most fertile. Already their ideals are not the ideals of the city majorities. They are placed rather out of the central flow of claptrap, and they are not led perpetually to rush with the thoughtless multitude after the new sensation. These men, in Southland and elsewhere, will think ; and their children, being better educated and equipped, will think more. There is going to be some real hard thinking this next few years, and thought is the most fatal foe of Seddonism. The people are going to recover from the fever and. 'get sound in the shade. The more they think, the worse it will be for Seddon. We shall come round insensibly to normal national conditions, and in our quietness and confidence shall be Seddon's shipwreck. The tyranny of the majority will persist, of course ; but as the majority 'becomes more widely representative and more variously constituted, the tyranny will become less offensive and less irritating in most. matters. Now, just consider Seddon's lamentable attitude towards the angel or the demon of No-license "

I was unable to consider that matter for the moment, because a doren commercial travellers trooped in. The evolution of the modern commercial traveller, the true specialist of the roads to-day, has been a process extending over little more than 20 years. Twenty years ago the average commercial traveller still reeked of the bar parlour. Of course, there were hosts of admirable exceptions ; but that was the rule. To-day, the commercial travellers, as a class, rank honourably among the best fellows in the world. They are over all the earth, with their keen eyes open and their keen -wits alert. They are the I pilots and leadsmen of the whole entranci ing odyssey of trade. Their education is ! always in the making, and their school lis as wide as the world. This Invercargill dofcen formed a choice sample lot. They talked with ease and astuteness of all sorts of questions of the day. They discussed trade conditions and the life of the road in a way that opened up to me luminous patches of experience of which the ordinary observer knows little or nothing. And in the end, of course, they talkeddpolitics ; and because tihey talked of politics in Invercargill they had to talk -of prohibition. Whereupon tha shrewd collective spirit of these keen and resourceful- men of business lifted up its "voice,' and said: "Prohibition, as we know it, is .dubious wherever it is not essentially, baclj >nd because a s big body of perfectly, well-meaning and generally honest "people are blinded by their prejudices or misconceptions to its badness, prohibition is going to spread yet farther afield and sway increasing majorities. Wherefore, in a, very short time now, Richard Seddon, "Leader of the People, will lift his feet once more and be carried off in still another direction by the crowd, a prohibitionist in his turn. We think that prohibition, as we know it, is at best dubious, because we find in prohibition districts a social atmosphere that is stale and flat when it isn't mean and squalid — an atmosphere that seems insensibly to stifle those generous amenities in the intercourse of man with man that we professional wanderers love, and reckon on as business assets. We be all most sober and reasonable men ; but in prohibition districts we are objects of dark suspicion. It is suspected that we are carriers of full flasks, perverters of the faithful ; though the faithful often take us to places we won't want to visit, to get by stealth the drinks we don't desire, and expect us to do this foolish thing Avith keen relish because we are breaking a stupid law. It is our -opinion that a law that stops the open, decently regulated sale of any commodity, while permitting its wholesale manufacture and distribution, is a farcical and illogical law at best. Some of us have to do with the sale of wines and spirits, and because we know that our trade still thrives in prohibition districts, we smile over our orders and feel a sort of contempt for constituted law — and this feeling cannot be good for us. It seems to us, as mere men of this present world, that there is no sense in any law that compels a whole community to sacrifice its independence because a misled or biassed does not realise the value of individual and communal liberty. It seems to us that it is barbarous to compel a, thousand men to go fettered because ten of their fellow citizens are not fit to be left free. Because we find no-license under existing conditions fruitful of malice and hypocrisy, and all the worst varieties of caut and sham, -we are not satisfied with no-license as it now exists. We do not doubt the sincerity of these ardent nsw reformers ; but we say that Richard Seddon, Leader of Men, etc., being in his heart of an utterly different opinion, should set out to divert crude optimism and mistaken zeal into paths less dangerous and mediasval. And we say, especially, that this question occupies far too l much of the attention and time of a country that has a hundred more urgent needs and grievances clamouring at the gate."

All this, 'being by way of the Objector's introduction to New Zealand politics, was very interesting and titneous ; so he went to bed to consider it. On the landing, the Commercial Man spoke a final word. "As it happens, I don't drink myself, and as a -rule my customers don't drink. From my professional standpoint, it doesn't matter a cent, to me whether the bars are shut or not. It is not with the shutting of the bare, but with the principle ia-

volved, that tho trouble commences. This is the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge. Directly a town gets full of no-license enthusiasm, it loses the distinguishing democratic flavour. It gets a f.orfc of sinister scowl on the face of it, and men look apologetically at the sun. This nicvement is a big step buck into the dark." I felt troubled. Outside my bedroom window the land lay bathed in moonlight, and the winds seem to chuckle in mocking refrain, " New Zealand is the Land of Constant Increase ; but all the credit is not due to Nature. Take the case of Southland. You see it to-day prosperous, self-reliant, stalwart to dare and do." Then the winds chuckled more, because they knew that prohibition, got by Lack of Logic out of Dread of Drink, was buckling on his uniform round the corner.