The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwiea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. FEIDAY, JULY 19, 1895. THE POLITICAL POSITION.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 17, 19 July 1895, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwiea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. FEIDAY, JULY 19, 1895. THE POLITICAL POSITION.

TnE reaction at the elections in the Home country has been startling even amongst those who foresaw a change. That the great and able Sir William Harcourt and such leading lights of the Labour party as Ben Tillett and Keir Hardy should be thrust out or rejected with contumely is surprising indeed. It must be remembered, however, that many points of their actual policy had never been enunciated on the hustings at their elections and those who put them in, have in no doubtful manner expressed that opinion. In a smaller sphere and a smaller way the same thing is going on in New Zealand and wo warn our present Ministry that what has occur; red at Home will undoubtedly take place here. They were returned to carry out Mr Ballance's policy, to bring borrowers in contact with the lenders in the Old Country, and not to borrow themselves on the excuse that they would iend it again. They were pledged against future loans and yet men see that the indebtedness of the country has mounted up enormously, a fact that no financial juglery could deceive us about. There is too much interference with trade, business, and the liberty of the subI'ect. Even the working man, who they pretend to study so much, begins to see that if they Must up his em ployers he must suffer too ; and if they give him a piece of land on easy terms, yet the land is no good to him if, in the first place, he is to be worried by red tape ; next, taxed out of all conscience ; and, lastly, according to the Premier's prophecy at Hokitika, that the taxation of the country is eventually to be solely extracted from the land (this pleased the miners), truly in a literal sense wiil it be said in those clays to come " Blessed is ho that hath nothing." Men's eyes are open ing and their minds are turning. The labouring classes have been too readily humbugged into the belief that in class being set against class their own class would rise and become paramount. They now have an inkling that as society is constituted each section depends for its welfare upon the well-doing of the others. The wages men are not good thinkers as a rule ; they are too much taken up with their struggle for existence, and therefore too much inclined to follow some leader whom they believe can be trusted. When they are deceived, however, they can and will show as much indignation as have the people of England. Let the Honorable the Ministers make the most of their present majority, but let them not think it is the voice of the country, for the time is approaching rapidly when they will be wofully deceived in their turn, and the taxpayers — high and low — will exhibit their feelings in their votes as emphatically as others have done by casting garbage at the idols they themselves had set up.