MOCKERY OF JUSTICE

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 192, 10 May 1940, Page 8

MOCKERY OF JUSTICE

Views On Government In Germany And Russia

In communistic Russia and Nazi Germany justice was a cynical mockery, said the Hon. J. A. Hanan, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, in his- address at the capping ceremony at Canterbury University College. Might had supplanted human rights. To exercise principles .of liberty was to experience the firing squad or the concentration camp. Those great principles of our liberties contained in Magna Carta, the vigorous development of which was aided and attested in many subsequent statutes, especially in the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights these throe were called “the Bible of the English Constitution”—and the beneficial measures of self-government, which we enjoyed had no equivalents in Nazi Germany or in a Communistic oligarchy such as governed the Russian people and now those of little heroic Finland, who had been the victims of a brutal and barbarous attack by the Communistic hordes of the .Soviet Russian despot. Liberty, like life, was born of pain and struggle. Poor Finland had passed through the cruel gates or sacrifice and martyrdom, torn, devas tated, and bleeding, in the noble endeavour to keep open the portals of freedom. The appalling act of aggression upon Finland by the Communistic Government of Soviet Russia and its unholy alliance with its erstwhile declared bitter enemy, Herr Hitler, should serve as an enlightening object lesson to those who unwisely worshiped foreign ideologies and would overthrow our cherished institutions or freedom and justice. Disciples of Communism enjoying liberty sought to destroy the very institutions and principles that made that liberty possible.