SANDY’S CORNER

Wanganui Chronicle, 30 October 1946, Page 4

SANDY’S CORNER

’KUNE’S EARLY DAYS Dear “Sandy,”—l see they have been celebrating Ohakune’s fiftieth birthday with a procession headed by a brass band playing “Roll Out the Barrel.” When I visited that pioneer settlement in the “earlies” it was in the guard’s van of a ballast trAin and the van was well filled with fivegallon kegs for Christmas cheer. Some of the kegs were leaking, And it was not vinegar. Them were the days!—“Karioi.” THE KIRK O’SOOTIA We give welcome, warm-hearted and real, to the Parliament of the Kirk o’Scotland in New Zealand, which is now sitting in our midst. We can -mell the warm Clyde, and vigour the Forth, can vision the purple heather, the Highlands and the Lowlands of the land that gave the race its birth. We hope, however, that this Parliament is not like another we know, and that “Mr. Speaker will nae be callin’ men tae orrder and askin’ yon honourable gentleman tae withdra’ yon word in th’ second tan last sentence, or take th’ consequences.’’ In a Kirk Parliament there will, we know, be the dignity befitting a Parliament. A line from Burns, in his tribute to his Highland Mary, might become apt were it changed just a wee bit: “Calm be your words and fair your actions.” We’ve been talking to Mum about the Assembly, and we’ve studied the purpose of “The White Book” and “The Blue Book” (which we believe the British Parliament copied), and we’ve become dulv impressed. We’ve marked the whiskev bottle, back in the top left-hand corner of the far cuoboard. “For medicinal purposes cnly during Assembly week," just m case Mum should forget. Not that she ever does! THOSE “ISTS” AND “ISMS” Dear “Sandy,”-—Can you define a Communist?—Wayfarer. We have a fairly definite idea, but are not sure that it would look well in print. However, this is what Mr. George S. Benson, president of Harding College. United States, said he would do were ho a Communist: “If I were a powerful Communist, trying to destroy American freedom and paralyse its prosperity, I would concentrate on three aims which ultimately will reduce any country to serfdom.” he writes. “First: I would foment strikes and create just as much industrial and fusion and uncertainty as possible. Second: I would scatter biased propaganda, misrepresenting businessmen and destroying faith in business. I would try to prove Private Enterprise a failure. “Third: I would boost all wasteful appropriation bills in Congress and teach people to expect something for nothing from Government— this to weaken the nation’s financial structure. “These three activities, carried on persistently and long enough, would wreck anv Democracy—any Republic.”