TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

Southland Times, Issue 19389, 1 November 1924, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

Sunday is the usual day for elections and referendum polls in Europe. Recent general elections in Germany, France, Italy and Finland were held oii Sundays. Throughout Europe, in • Protestant and Catholic countries alike, with the exception of the British Isles, Sunday is regarded as the logical day for choosing governmente. In Switzerland, where there is said to be more direct government than in most countries, there are elections, referendums, etc., at frequent intervals, and always on Sunday. In Sweden, which has had local self-government longer than many of the Continental States, all political business has for generations been transacted on Sunday, usually directly after Protestant church service. Caucuses are then held, political rallies, city and town elections. Church officials are invariably chosen on Sundays. On no other day would the country people in particular think of leaving their work long enough to take part in political life.

Many Italians, though they have no more relish 'for tyrants than their early Roman fathers had, acquiesced in Signor Mussolini’s dictatorship as a violent medicine for what they believed to be a dangerous public disease, says- the Manchester Guardian. Italian social wellbeing and public order were, they considered, dissolving helplessly after the war, paralysed and thrown into confusion by a hopeless kind of Labour movement which constructed nothing and: seemed to hope that a new social organism could be* created by merely scrapping an old one. Had Mussolini made an appeal to these elements of goodwill and public spirit, he might have become a truly national leader. But he appears now to have finally made the wrong choice and flung himself back into the arms of those extreme Fascists whose excesses disqualify them for any serious part in the permanent government of a modern country. One of the symptoms of this lurch back toward impoasibilism is the reviving power of the local Fascist Ras, or district boss, throughout Italy. Another is an evident inclination at the Fascist headquarters to dispense with Parliament altogether and divide its functions between the dictator himself and the caucus of his party. Another is a disposition to set country against town, exalting rural Italy, where Fascism is relatively strong, at the expense of urban Italy, in which it is much weaker—a curi ous counterpart to the Soviet policy of exalting the urban Russian, who is sometimes a Bolshevik, at the expense of the Russian peasant, who very seldom is. In fact, there are many curious parallels between Fascism and Bolshevism—natural expressions and illustrations of a fundamental similarity. For they have a common basis of sheer militarism —the power to oppose to all public discontent or criticism the simple argument of a sufficiency of armed men who will obey any order, however oppressive, that they receive from their masters. And now, as always throughout history, the cause of human freedom depends on mankind’s absolute refusal to acquiesce in any such basis for a permanent social order, whatever name or flag be given to it or waved over it.