Rangitikei Advocate. TWO-EDITIONS DAILY. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1914. THE SCANDAL MONGERS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11114, 2 December 1914, Page 4

Rangitikei Advocate. TWO-EDITIONS DAILY. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1914. THE SCANDAL MONGERS.

ONE of the most scandalous charges which has been made against the Premier is that he has been instrumental in having a railway made to an ostrich tarm in which he is interested. The accusation has been made again and again in the Press and on tiie platform, but with an exceptionally cunning conception of the limits of the law of libel the charges have never been sufficiently direct and definite to enable him to drag the slanderers into a court of law to face'the penalties of their iniquitous imputations. Now that all the facts of the case are available we are able to state that the railway referred to was authorised by the Liberal Government, and that —and this is most important—the line is of no advantage whatever to the ostrich tarm simply because the main line of railways already runs through one corner of the property. As the new line was originally laid out it intersected the farm, and had construction followed that line it would have benefited the owners very considerably. But as now being made it does not touch the property except where it junctions witli the main line at the corner of the Section. With the main line running practically north and south to the large centre! the farm was already well provided w.ith facilities for its trade. But inasmuch as the new line runs 4 into the hack country tor a few miles and terminates at a dead end it requires a politician of the deepest dye to realise how the market for ostrich fearheis has been extensively benefited by its construction.

It partakes of the nature of a national disaster that political controversy is degenerating in some quarters into a campaign of scurrility and aspersion of the public and private character of men politically opposed to them, Could anything he 'more contemptible than that a man should draw such inferences as that the Minister of Mines was responsible for the deaths of the Huntly miners and that the Premier was causing a practically private railway to be constructed from public money, and making the round of the platforms of the country, chortling with unholy joy as he vents the lies? There is nothing like the political imputation factory of New Zealand in the whole wide world except at that institution in Berlin at which war news is coined for consumption by outside nations. During the last few years we have witnessed a process of gradual moral deterioration in a proportion of the representatives of the people in Par liament. We have seen a time when a prominent man thought himself justified in returning his portfolio and practically retiring from public life because it was said by an opponent that he ought to ho ashamed of himself for an administrative act of his. Daring the remainder of his life he must have been painfully impressed to sse public life decline from that level of political chivalry and dignity which he represented and in the name of which he protested, to that kind of blackguardism winch consists in'* uttering imputations which tarnish the reputation of a public man, and against which he has no adequate defence.

We are far from suggesting that what we are protesting against now Is totally jonfined to any particular party or that the Reform section if our legislators are necessarily patterns of all the virtues, but we have no hesitation in saying that New Zealand has never seen in its short legislative career an election campaign conducted by the Opposition which has been characterised by such an amount of misrepresentation and calumny as the present. Neither do we include the whole of the Liberal rank and file in our condemnation. There may be many of the gentlemen who are now wooing the electors with the fraudulent verbal coinage sent into currency by a section of the Liberal Party who believe every word of it. There is such a mental condition as political bigotry, which can become as ironbound aud as insusceptible to change by any evidence that can be adduced against their ism as that of any religious bigot who is verging on a state of religious mania. If they could be isolated and classified it would be found that they were more numerous in the community than anybody suspects. In fact the world is pretty well full of people who cannot be moved from their early mental pre-conceptions by the most convincing possible later evidences of their falsity, aud the repetition of the current scandal by such is due to the misfortune of their limitations, But the small and cunning clique which In its recklessness and its disregard of truth spins its fabrications, and at whose door lies the

charge of corrupting political life to the base level of a Prussian war factory should be' completely banned from public life. If the community would do this it would have no difficulty in laying its hand on the guilty ones.