PSEUDO-LIBERALISM.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1750, 29 September 1879, Page 4

PSEUDO-LIBERALISM.

[“ Australasian.” 3

The curious system of political thought in these colonies which calls itself Liberalism has no more characteristic feature than its hostility to capital. For instances of this feeling in Victoria we need not go far. It is exhibited in the notable land-mortgage regulations by which Mr Longmore thought that he could crush the money-lender, though, as the result proved, he could only crush the borrower. The same statesman’s aspiration to get hold of the throat of capital and strangle it is fresh in the general memory. And it is notorious that in the Assembly any reference to the Banks throws Mr Berry and his colleagues into a state of frenzy, in which they can do nothing but utter slanders for the rest of the evening. In Now Zealand we see that that archLiberal Sir George Grey has lately been giving his views on the same subject. In that colony, as in this, people who have no particular party interest in politics are inclined to take alarm at the wild and revolutionary talk of the Premier, and to depredate the use of language eminently calculated to drive capital out of the country. Sir George Grey, in a recent speech at Wellington, tried to allay anxiety on the subject. And the way he took to do so was peculiar. He told his hearers that they were not to be deterred from a certain political course by the fear that it would frighten capitalists and capital away. “ Let them go. The country would be none the worse for the loss. Ho told them further that positively there might be too much foreign capital in a new country.” To argue against wild, whirling talk of this kind would be a degree of folly only second to its own. It is sufficient to point out the identity of the spirit of the Victorian “ Liberal” and his follow-believer in New Zealand. Both look on capital as an enemy to bo destroyed, and hold that by making the community poorer they in some unknown way improve its position. We observe that the conductors of the Ministers’ paper at Wellington were wiser in their generation than the premier, and carefully suppressed in their report of his speech the tirade against capital from which we have quoted, thinking possibly it might be too strong for weak digestions. But the other papers have taken care that none of the democratic-autocrat’s sentiments shall fall to the ground unheeded, and give the whole passage with careful completeness.