CLASS GOVERNMENT

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6441, 22 January 1924, Page 5

CLASS GOVERNMENT

A TERRIBLE EVIL The horror of Russia was as necessary for the world’s education as the horror of Germany. Mankind learns its lessons expensively with infinite waste. It could learn the utter wickedness of Kaiserism and Sultanism only by such a war as that. It could comprehend the necessity of the United States of the World only by spending millions in lives and billions in treasure. No persuasion or reason no tuteage of peace, could convince humanity of its essential Oneness. The idea had to be blasted in. And to get its real lesson in Democracy the human race needed the wild orgy of Bolshevism quite as much as it needed the madness of Prussianism. For both teach the same truth. And the truth is'that Government by Class is Evil and only Evil. Germany’s outbreak and its eventual collapse will show the crime, in all its hideusness, of. government by' a so-called upper class. Russia’s red riot, its plunge into tyranny, assassination, famine and bankruptcy, will show the crime of government by the so-called lower class.

Democracy is as much opposed to the one as to the other.

Democracy faces both .ways. It opposes tyranny by the Proletariat as firmly as it opposes tyranny by the Aristocrat. It stands for government of the people, by the people, for the people. It has a place for every man; for the scholar, the clerk, the poet and for the bricklayer, the farmer and the engineer. To say that the welfare of a nation depends upon those who labor with their hands is as much nonsense as to say it depends upon its lords and gentlemen. It depends upon all. Democracy means unity. It means co-operation, organisation, mutual interdependence. And lest the world, which likes to go to extremes, should imagine, in winning this year against its autocratic marauders, that Government gy Kaisers, Kings and Sultans is the only enemy, and that we shall have peace forever when they are overthrown., it had to be shown, in the lurid page of Russia, that Government by a tyrannical Proletariat is every whit as dangerous. The one great evelasting stubborn and diabolical enemy of Democracy is .class, in whatever guise.