WHAT HOLLAND WOULD HAVE DONE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXIV, Issue 17731, 3 December 1919, Page 6

WHAT HOLLAND WOULD HAVE DONE.

This is what Mr H. E. Holland, leader of the extremists, said on October 18* 1918, when, after four years' struggle and sacrifice, victory was at last within the reach of the Allies: — It seemed to him that peace was the world's supreme need—that the time to negotiate was now. The New Zealand Parliament should intimate to the Imperial Government that the people of New Zealand are in favour of the discussion of peace terms. They who talked recklessly about refusing to discuss peace until Germany was beaten to her knees indulged in a wild and criminal bombast for which neither the Labour movement nor the saner elements outside of it could accept responsibility. ! Mr Holland in October, 1918, would have cravenly thrown up the sponge and made peace with an unbeaten Germany if he had been at the head of affairs. Are New Zealand people going to give him a position of power in their Parliament? We suppose (says the Manawatu Times) that the Moderate League's representative made dut as good a case as possible for the people of New Zealand to saddle themselves with hotel properties from one end of the country to the other, but we are certainly amongst the people that he failed to convert. It was pointed out to us on Saturday night, as a dreadful example of the kind of thing Mr Armstrong desires to saddle this country with, that at Westport, with a populattion of about 4000 per-' sons, there are 22 licensed houses, and at Greymouth, with a population of about 5000, about 28 hotels. Between Waimangaroa and Burnett's Face, where less than 1000 people live, or exist, there are seven hostelries of sorts. No doubt the licensees or owners would be very glad to have these places of resort taken off their hands, but the difficulty would be for the politicians to dispose of them at anything like face value. Many publichouses all over the countryside would, if deprived of their mission of dispensing food and comfort for man and beast, hang very heavily on the hands of the purchasers. The purchase of hotetl prenY.ses by the people of New Zealand might in occasional cases prove a profitable investment, but the whole scheme is one at which private enterprise would assuredly baulk. If five per cent, of the electors vote to saddle New Zealand with £10,000,000 "worth" of properties of this description it will indicate that the margin of responsibility in the electorates is rather less than generally imagined.