BRITISH LIBERALS.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15999, 30 May 1924, Page 10

BRITISH LIBERALS.

! MR A. CHAMBERLAIN'S VIEW. SOME QUESTIONS ON DEMOCRACY. In the April number of the Empire Review Mr Austen Chamberlain discusses "The House of Commons"with the conclusion that "so far ft stands unshaken amid the downfall of autocracies and the wreckage of other democratic institutions." Of a "considerable number of the Liberal members,"' he declares, "it requires no great sagacity to foresee the fate." "Voting day by day with those whom they have put into office, they will experience the facile descent which has already conducted many of their associates into the Socialistic camp, and when another election is upon them they will find it is too late to retrace their steps." But "another, if smaller, section" of the party has "affinities on a-U questions with the younger and more liberal school of Conservative thought.'' "They were rushed into a decision which all of them deplored and many resented, and ihey are not unlikely to assert their independence in subsequent decisions when critical issues arise. Democracy. As to democracy in general, Mr Chamberlain asks, '"Has the experiment succeeded? Is the world the better for it? Do the nations understand one another more fully? Are they more patient with one another's prejudices or more tender to one another's susceptibilities?" "Here at home a century of endeavour has culminated in the decisive triumph of democratic institutions. Are we really more free, more independent, less selfish, or more patriotic than our forefathers?-" To Parliamentary institutions, he points out, "there are but two alternatives." "On the one hand, the autocracy of an individual; on the other the tyranny of a section; on the one side the despotism of a Czar; on the other than the depotism of a Soviet" Mr Chamberlain goes on to say: "If the public ceases to respect the House of Commons, the House will cease to respect itself. . . Interests will organise while the public is idle, minorities will be active while it is passive, and the House of Commons will in time cease to be representative while it still remains all-powerful." The Rise of Labour. Amid the "immense" and "revolutionary" changes that have been brought about by successive extensions of the franchise, "more striking and more important" is the rise to the position of the second party in the State of the Labour Party. The danger that the line of clecvage in our politics would no longer be drawn vertically through the classes, but horizontally between the classes, he regards as "for the present, at any rate, a diminishing danger." "The doctrines of the Labour Party, while (hey attract many who do not belong to the class of manual labourers, repel great masses of the manual workers themselves. After all, the natural political divisions are those of temperament and character. They are not those of interest or class. But though tin's is a diminishing danger, it is one that should be watched, for that way lies the road first to class domination and then to minority rule. We have seen it in other countries; let us learn their lesson and profit by then; experience."