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Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23258, 20 July 1945, Page 4

“Of all problems of human governance the most difficult, as the most fundamental, is the proper relation between the government and the governed. between the informed and the uninformed, - ’ writes Harold Nicolson in the Spectator. “It is not sufficienttv realised that this problem, within the last 30 years, has imposed itself in a new and highly complicated form. In the distant days of the Green City States it was possible for all free citizens to gather together in the Assembly, to hear the ’voice of a smote herald.’ to listen to argument, an! to decide policy by direct and immediate voting; and even then they had then Thersites and their Cleons anxio’i I ■' confuse judgment and to arouse partisan emotions. But thereafter the body of the citizens became too numerous for any direct consultation and a system was devised whereby, at a democracy, the body ol the eii.iz“ii delegated their legislative powti o elected representative. Bui. ■ jr-o these representatives tended Io lu Irn ■ to the governing, or more accurately the governmei 1. class, the .fiction arose under which what was m la"! an oligarchy wa. described as a democracy. The rcla'ionr between the Government and the Legislature, even between the Cabinet of the day and the leaders of the Opposition, were so intimate and continuous that contact and comprehension could.on the whole be easily maintained by the ordinary machine of Parliament. Within the last 30 years, however, two developments have occurred which tend to destroy the effectiveness of the oligarchic fiction and to restate the problem in its more primitive form. On the one hand the public, as they become bet!. : educated and more self-assured, tend to acquiesce less readily in the representative fiction and to demand some more direct relation between themselves and those who rule; on the other hand, the astonishing d “■ <;<.pment in the means of comim;.::e:il i m between the governing minori’v and the mass of the governed rent!.- th): ‘direct relation' technically far iw t'easlbb than ever before Tire ■ of a single herald' '.in to-d:iy rearl, two hundred million people ,a tree .ame second."