The Feildign Star. SATURDAY, JULY 11, 1891.

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 5, 11 July 1891, Page 2

The Feildign Star. SATURDAY, JULY 11, 1891.

False Gods The voting of the Labor Party on the occasion of the division on Mr Dutine's amendment, was a surprise. The following is what they yoted against. " That it would be more in the interests of the public, in view of the surplus estimated to be available by the Financial Statement and the proposal to reduce the postal rates, that any relief to be given should be in the direction of a reduction of the duties on the necessaries of life." Which means that they have broken those solemn pledges, made by each and all of them on the hustings, that if returned to Parliament they would do their best to relieve the working men of the heavy burdens of taxation which are now crushing them to the earth. Yet, on the very first opportunity given them of affirming their formerly professed opinions, they voted diametrically opposite to them. We certainly expected better things than this from these professional philanthropists. These were the men who said they were not '•party men" but would represent the " down-trodden serfs " to the end that their manifold wrongs might be redressed or revenged. Now they are bound to the chariot wheels of a party whose " Liberalism " out— Herod's the most rampant " Conservatism " ever heard of in this colony, the happy abode of political fads, andfaddests. These images of clay will surely be broken by the people whose trust they have betrayed. No doubt they will make apologies, and advance sophisms to excuse or explain their reasons for their treachery, but it will be difficult for them to persuade men, whose eyes have been opened to this unpleasant fact, that their representative did not go into Parliament to represent the laboring men of the colony, but to gratify a selfish ambition. Their prototypes were tried in the English House of Commons and proved utter failures, and the same fate seems likely to attend them in the New Zealand Parliament. On the subject of the reduction in the rates of postage, however profitable such may be to business men, we really cannot understand by what process of reasoning it can be demonstrated that taking a tax off people who can afford to bear it, and who have never complained of it, to put it on the backs of the working men who are already paying too much, can be claimed as a consistaut act of a self styled Liberal Government. .The present majority of the House is largely made up of men who scrambled into Parliament over the shoulders of the working men of the colony, and now they are acting up to proverbicial history, and kicking over the ladder.