BLUNDER UPON BLUNDER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10925, 14 November 1913, Page 4

BLUNDER UPON BLUNDER.

Tire British Cabinet made a. hideous blunder in ordering the prosecution of Lao-kin for "sedition" for declaring that he never used " God Save the King" as an expression other than that of contempt. And now they have accentuated the mistake by interfering with tho judgment of the Court and allowing Larkin to go free to issue reckless threats and spread disruption through the country. Larkin ungaoled was powerful enough. But now he has been elevated to the position of a hero and a martyr, and, if his tongue docs not slay him, ho will be the stormy petrel of British politics for a long time to oomo. Public speech is a safetyvalve. It is the best instrument of soqial protection wo have. Silent and determined forces are those that reactionary governments havo got to be afraid of. The soap-box orator at his maddest is the most harmless being alive, because the madder and more undisciplined he is the greater capacity he exhibits for giving his case completely away and alienating that sound public sympathy upon which all governments must rely. It has never yet paid a government to gaol people for exercising their right of free soeech, no matter how indisereetely exercised. It has been demonstrated in a score of cases that every administration which exercises this power is slain at the ballot-box. The government may be right, technically, but human nature will not. stand for the suppression of tho hard-won privilege of free speech. Larkin is a wind-bag,, but back of his flamboyant and emotional oratory are giant wrongs crying in vain to be righted—wrongs that are so firmly entrenched that they can only be righted by first shaking society to its very foundations. Larkin is a, barbarian who shocks the orthodox by the explosions of his wrath, but Larkin and Larkinism play a necessary part in the scheme of things. If the world were run on lines of equity and justice, and if human beings were treated as they ought to bo treated, there would be uo need for Larkin. Neither would eighty thousand people be starving in Dublin on the verge of winter. As matters are Larkin is the natural product of his environment, the storm-voice of revolution, the counsel of desperation and despair to whom nothing is sacred. . To dam agencies of this kind at one corner is merely to open the floodgates in a. 1 hundred places. Even the most seemingly righteous cause cannot afford to persecute its opponents. When life and property are imperilled the authorities must intervene, but threats and vapourings are treated by wise men and wise Governments as merely the symptoms of disordered temperaments and imaginations.