THE LEGION

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 148, 26 June 1933, Page 16

THE LEGION

NEED FOR CO-OPERATION

BUILDERS, NOT ANALYSTS

Addressing an audience of over 400 people in the King George Theatre, Lower Hutt, the leader of the Kcw Zealand Legion (Dr. If. Campbell Begg) stressed the need for the eo-op,-eration of all in dealing with the problems of the rlay.

"We are asking you to become builders and not analysts," he said. "We are seeking your co-operation in the solution of pressing national problems, not your criticism or adherence to suggested solutions already made. We are in fact treating you as individuals who have some contribution to make to these subjects and not merely as those _to whom something is thrown for criticism, acceptance, aud rejection. It is possible that the role thus suggested to you may seem unusual and strange. We believe" it is. It is a reversal of all that you have been accustomed to in political thought, but it is because you and we and the people of New Zealand require a new point of view on these political questions that the New Zealand Legion is urging it. If it is visionary, idealistic, and impossible to ask the people of New Zealand to think widely, daringly, and fearlessly on the matters of their own destiny we are visionary indeed. But if. we can reach in this audience those who have the capacity and the will, a mere handful of those who are ill content to have their political meat served up to them reacly-made by orders, if we reach a few who will dare to throw off traditions, catch-Mies, and slogans, detest the falsehood in the so-called axioms and truisms of political catch-cries, emancipate themselves from the wellestablished traditions of the past, and have done with a priori reasoning and face the facts as they are, our presence here will not have been in vain."

Instead of the setting up of endless Commissions, the Legion asked the people to set themselves up as one great communion whose order of reference was: —(1) The best economic arrangement in regard to currency, land, tariffs, and all vital matters of that nature. (2) The best form of Administration and Government to express the people's will and supplement it for the people's good. The people had a right to govern themselves, but they had a duty to see that the government was really by the people and not by those who would delude the people. No economic principle would be of any avail unless its administration was as sound as it could bo made. The more drastic the change in the economic sphere, the more necessary a good administration to secure its beneficent effects. •