The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1921. MASSEYDOM AND CHAOS

New Zealand Tablet, 15 September 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1921. MASSEYDOM AND CHAOS

(&'—&■ HE man Empire went down to ruin while W \MU e P eo pl e clamored for feasting and frolic, the popular cry, Partem et circenses, ■^Jtil yt drowning the crash of the falling commonwealth. History repeats itself to-day. While from the watch-towers a few voices r jgSfojr here and there sound warning notes, the pP' mass of the people, led by their corrupt political leaders, disregarding every serious consideration and blind in their pursuit of pleasure, imitate in more ways than one the Gadarene swine that rushed headlong to destruction. Behold how England at the present time impresses a Canadian visitor : "We are- no Puritans, but the Byzantine levity that we see all round us here, in the theatres, in the streets, in the mad frenzy over prize-fights and cricketmatches, , tennis championships, and golf championships, racing, and all the things that do not matter, while your house is burning over your ears and your trade is paralysed, and twenty per cent, of your people are workless and being kept quiet by doles, and your finance has collapsed— this leaves us dumb and amazed. Are we mad or are you V New Zealand is like England in other ways than in that its people cannot take a beating whether from the Springboks or from th 6 Brothers' Boys. In sad truth, it is a little England ; and in its own little way may be applied to the Dominion, what the outspoken Canadian said of the decadent island in the northern seas which all true jingoes hail as their motherland.

Look at our newspapers. With much reason (and much to our shame) be it said that the press is the mirror of the public mind. Think of that and.dwell on the meaning of the long report cabled out for Colonial consumption, concerning the arrival in London of a posturing humorist named Charlie Chaplin. Surely it is as fitting as it is significant that side by side with the prominence and publicity given to the funny man of picture-land we have columns of piffle about the sayings and doings of a person called William Massey, an. Orangeman who was elected Prime Minister of New Zealand on a minority vote and largely through the tactics of a horsewhipped parson. It is lamentable that it should even be thought possible that news of the Bedlamites who thronged London's streets to honor

Charlie Chaplin could be of public interest in New Zealand ; but it is equally lamentable that public money should be spent in cabling to us accounts of the movements of a Prime Minister whose record is such that if our people had a little saving common sense he and his fellows in the "muddlement" would be brought to a strict account for their hopeless and brazen bungling. Up to the time when Mr. Massey left this country for his latest tour at public expense he used to 1 * denounce every person who pointed out that the Government was misleading the people and had brought New Zealand into serious financial danger. But as soon as Mr. Massey and his coterie of place-hunting politicians had secured higher salaries they too discovered what a short time before it was almost treason for others to see, and the well-paid placemen set about what they called economising. They did not suffer, but some returned soldiers and several employes did; and it was all in the cause of that great financial stringency which Mr. Massey had so shortly before told us, with his usual bluster, was only a delusion in the minds of a few pessimists. If Lloyd George has brought England to the brink of ruin, our Orangeman has done the same for New Zealand. We have our army of unemployed and our politicians helpless in the face of the problem. before them. We have the cry of companies all over the Dominion calling for loans and for more loans to enable them to keep above water. We have the farmers, facing grimly a future of low prices, murderous freights, crushing taxes, and high cost of living. We have our out-of-date and dilapidated railways run at a loss of some £4OOO a day. We have the best ships in the Union Company's fleet laid aside for want of work with no immediate prospect of employment. We have our trains cut down, and our steamer service far behind what' it was forty years ago. And, needless to say, we have all the waste and all the extravagance that are to be expected when incompetent Ministers are at the head of public affairs.

If, as we said before, the press is the mirror of the people, what hope is there of a public content to be entertained by accounts of the doings of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Massey? And, if a country gets the government it deserves, what hope is there of New Zealand while it accepts as a matter of course the administration of its affairs by a Prime Minister and a Cabinet without intelligence, without principle, without a single one of the qualities which men, to whom is entrusted the task of steering the Ship of State through turbulent seas and amid dangerous channels, ought to possess? Of old the men who ruined Rome gave the pepple their Panem et cir censes, and the Roman eagles fell into the dust; to-day the people of New,Zealand get Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Massey and never pause to think what it means.