LABOUR CANDIDATES.

Observer, Volume XVI, Issue 910, 6 June 1896, Page 2

LABOUR CANDIDATES.

Should We Make Good Workmen Into

Bad legislators?

Why all this fnss that is being made just now about the selection of a Labour candidate to contest the Auckland City seat at the coming general election ? Moreover, what is a Labour candidate ?- Presumably he is a working man, and, if this be so, the majority of the candidates who will offer themselves are Labour candidates. For we are all more or less working men. The country is a young colony, ita inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the work of colonization, and we have really very few men amongst us who belong to what can be called the leisured class Oar House of Representatives is mostly composed of working men and lawyers. Oar Government consists almost exclusively of working

men

Therefore, why should one man be pat forward as a Labour candidate in contradistinction to others who are now or have been working men ? The cry is a false one. It is a cry raised by interested men from interested motives. We are essentially a community of working ruen, and when our Parliament is elected it will largely be a Parliament of working men of one kind or another. There is, however, this difficulty between the ordinary candidate who has been a working man and the latter-day Labour candidate. The former is, as a rule, a man of ability and thrift who has raised himself to some extent above his fellows. The Labour candidate is a man in the ranks of Labour who has never developed ability enough to enable him to rise. And, being a man of mediocre capabilities, his natural position is at the working bench and not in the legislative halls of the country.

It is a simple issue. The avenues of advancement and culture in this country are broad and free to everyone. And if a man has not the application and ability to make his own way along those avenues he is not entitled to be wheeled. Parliament is open to every capable man who wins the confidence of his fellows. And, as a rule, the men who get there are working men of a superior class. It is the principle of the survival of the fittest. And why we should depart from that principle, in order to take competent workmen from their bench and make incompetent legislator! of them, passes my comprehension. Mr Ballance experimented in this direction with the Legislative Council, and failed dismally, and the results of that precedent are not such as should encourage the trades unionists to further experiments in the same direction. "What we want is nnited action to secure the election of men of broad Liberal sympathies.