DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18844, 6 April 1931, Page 5

DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL

FAILURE IN AUSTRALIA. Bishop Crotty, of Bathurst, addressing members of the Constitutional Association in Sydney, said that Australia did not possess democracy. There was little or no government; nor was there government by the people. He could find nobody who was being enriched by it in body, mind, or spirit. “I can take you out this afternoon to thousands of men and women, on the land and off it, who are being ruined,” the speaker proceeded. “The democratic experiment at any time was dangerous, but it has positively no hope of being successful when it gaily jettisons every democratic principle, every sanity, and every safeguard by which it is bound. Democracy stands to raise a race of men who live by work, and not hoboes.” (Cheers.) Four factors needed watching to ensure a democratic success, Bishop Crotty said. Democracy must have its backgrounds, its principles, its policies, and its parties. It was largely the business of education and religion to provide its backgrounds. It was those backgrounds which they had largely lost. Democracy could be built only on men and women who believed in man | and believed in God. It could not be built on cynicism or unfaith. It must hitch its waggon to some star. When its backgrounds disappeared its principles went with them. One such that had left them was the principle of fellowship. The greatest danger of to-day was a 'certain dogged, savage, relentless determination to keep men and classes apart. The men behind this conspiracy posed as pacifists. They were veritable doves of peace when national integrities were threatened. But they did not mind how much industrial explosives they left about or how many lighted matches they dropped among them. No return to democracy was possible until this conspiracy against their social unities had been defeated. Democracy, too, was based on work. Sentimentalists who quoted scripture freely and uncritically, in defence of their own pet obsessions, might be reminded that, while the care of the weaker brethren should always be a charge on their true democratic instincts, there was nevertheless no benediction promised or hinted, either in history or in Holy Writ, to a nation that insisted on reducing the output of its giants to the capacity of its dwarfs. Democracy, moreover, was based on a

fundamental loyalty and on the authority of the common will. But that authority to-day had well nigh left them, its sovereignty replaced by lawless bullies and petty oligarchies, which possessed no democratic charter and yet increasingly dominated their affairs. Havfllg recovered their backgrounds and their principles they must make those principles flow down into their policies and become operative in them, and then set about the further task of fashioning the fighting implements which would make those larger policies vocal in their Legislatures. Many new movements, said Bishop Crotty, were springing up that were dedicated to this emd. But they were bewildered and competitive. They needed marshalling under some common banner if their efforts were to be made practically operative. In the last resort, it was the people that must be lifted to new dedications. There was a great cry abroad for some new leader. But it was not only better leaders—it was better followers that Australia needed. The people of that country on the whole, had had better leaders than their political indifference had deserved. It was easy to sneer at professional politicians; but were men prepared to go in and out unpaid, They would find it difficult to staff their Legislatures with men of that heroic stuff. Even such men as these could do little to arrest the drift, until a new public opinion and a new patriotism were ranged behind them, which refused to enthrone a party above the State. “I think politicians should be paid, but I do object to being misgoverned and misguided by well-paid, incompetents and windbags,” the bishop added.