OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19344, 19 November 1932, Page 9

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

SOME INTERESTING VIEWPOINTS The Hiller Meteorite “The National-Socialist Party of Herr Hitler, which hoped to gain a clear majority, and which has emerged by far the most numerous party in the State, has more than twice as many seats as it won at the election of 1930. But it is, nevertheless, a disappointed party; for the votes cast for it show only a very slight increase on those which it had gained in the numerous State elections of the last two years. It seems, indeed, to have reached its high-water mark; and its tremendous bid for triumph has failed when its members’ hopes were highest.”—“The Times” (London). Breaking War’s Teeth “As a sincere but, I hope, sane lover of peace. I want to make a protest on behalf of soldiers and sailors against the complete misunderstanding both of fighting and war mentality which is I being exhibited by the highbrows at 1 Geneva. Have they really so little ; imagination—so bad a memory? Is it j possible they can really be so blind as to believe that when a nation is fighting for its life it will hesitate to use its ordinary civil aeroplanes for ‘bombardment from the air’? Would they expect a drowning man who has clutched a straw to leave hold of it if you shouted at him through a megaphone, ‘That’s private property.’ If our children want to fight they will fight, and fight with clubs and battleaxes if there’s nothing better to hand. The thing is to break the bad habit, j not to try to legalise and regulate it. i If ever we are to have in this j world there is only one sane way in which at least to make a beginning—abolish conscription and you break the teeth of war.”—Sir lan Hamilton.

Representative Government • Representative Government was in- ! vented in the Middle Ages to secure | the co-operation of a few scattered squires and farmers and bring them into relation with the central authority. It has become an instrument wielded by vast masses of voters, more or less literate, in whose hands have been placed the keys which unlock our national destiny. You have thus a rapid industrial revolution and a vast political revolution colliding with an old Parliamentary system which is evolving with infinite caution. The minds of the citizens, the economic forces, the machinery of Government, are all moving, but at different rates of acceleration. Out of the resulting confusion. various proposals for reform have emerged—Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, Devolution, are familiar post-war examples of attempts to combine economic and political freedom. Elsewhere a remedy has been sought in Dictatorship, where liberty is at a minimum and force and compulsion at a maximum.” —Mr Thomas Jones, C.H.. in the “Welsh Outlook.”