INTEREST REIPUBLICAE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 135, 4 December 1929, Page 10

INTEREST REIPUBLICAE

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—Mr. H. D. Bennett's action in withdrawing from the contest for the representation of Hutt has been approved by several correspondents as an example of public spirit. Doubtless much depends on the point of view. Mr. Bennett has told the public that his object was to save the anti-Socialist vote from the perils of division. Thus he asks us to realisa that he is an anti-Socialist. Yet this is the same Mr. Bennett who was one o£ the most clamant advocates of a municipal monopoly in tramways! When the proposal was first mooted as a timorous suggestion, Mr. Bennett boldly declared that private competitors with the municipal tramways should be driven out of business. Men of enterprise had already embarked in the business, had invested their capital in it, and not a few had staked their all on its success. Nevertheless, they were ruthlessly cast aside by legislation, and now that a monopoly has been conferred by law on the municipalities the public are invited to believe that the business men who are behind it aro achieving great Euecess.,

Thus it has come to pass that the pub-: lie are compelled by law to ride in the trams, even though many of them must perforce be strap-hangers! All this has been done at the bidding of that command-, ing statesman, the Hon. 3. G. Coates— the man who was alleged to get things done—whose motto, paraded by campaign, managers during the election of 1925, is "Less Government in business and more business in Government!" But in making the tiaras a monopoly by legal compulsion, Mr. Coates took his courage in both hands, because he was supported by such, sturdy anti-Socialists as—Mr. H. D Bennett!

In his masterly essay on "The Servile State" Mr. Hilaire Belloc maintains that the real proponents of Socialism are not the avowed advocates of the creed who confess their desire to abolish private property, but the professed anti-Socialists who, while loudly denouncing Socialism, are all the time applying and extending it. Of such is Mr. H. D. Bennett and the party that dares to call itself the Reform. Party. Great is humbug and it shall prevail!—l am, etc., „. _ , P. J. O'EEGAN. 3rd December.