GOVERNMENT BY VIOLENCE

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 31397, 28 February 1923, Page 4

GOVERNMENT BY VIOLENCE

A vigorous article pointing out the danger of Fascism in Italy and snowing its affinity to Sovietism appeared recently in the Manchester Guardian. It says:—“All our dictators pay the traditional tribute of vicj to virtue. They take away by force from the great masses of men who only want to he left to themselves, til**?/ right to run their own lives in their own wav. But they all, if only in some < ritical form of woinls, acknowledge the existence of the right winch they outrage. They are tyrants, in fact, but they all profess with particular ardour the virtue' they have not ; they knock democracies down. but only, it seems, because they are more, democratic than democracy itself. National freedom, they tell us, is so dear to their hearts that they fee! themselves hound i.ll duty to r< train for its sake from holding general elections. Apart from these professions of being .so liberal that they must abolish liberty until they have created a new and better world for it to function in, they are precisely our old friends of other generations, the Dictators, the First Consuls mwl Caesars of every description. And in effect, they all put up the old moiiachic claim to some sort, of divine right or other. Divine right in rulers is simply an enormous jyositi.veiiess on their part, a supremely assured <•or.seiousn.ess that the people do not know what is what, and that they, the rulers, do—that mere numbers are nothing, and that if aHI Ireland or all Italy thinks that it wants one th ug, and a single Do Valera or | M ussslini tl inks it ought to want ‘

the opposite, then this settles it; inspiration must be respected. Of course, when once you begin basing claims to absolute authority upon your ow n imperious sense of being wiser and more patriotic, than your QHfreighbour, there is 110 end to it. Every bar-parlour in Western Europe resounds every Saturday right with expressions o* this glowing consciousAnd when once democracy lets liberties be taken with itT new vistas of hope must open before Mussoli—nis. D*Annunzics, Lenins. and Do Valeras of all shapes and sizes.