DANGEROUS IDEAS.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 126, 14 June 1937, Page 6

DANGEROUS IDEAS.

" Ideas may be very dangerous tliings. There is no country in Europe that has a Constitution like ours, which has evolved through the centuries into the Constitution as we know it to-dhy. Therefore, it was a more easy matter for ideas to swefep people off their feet in those countries. And throughout the whole of Russia, Germany and Italy you have those peoples, numbering hundreds of millions, who are governed by ideas alien to the ideas which we hold in this coontry. They are the ideas of Communism and the ideas of differing forms of Fascism. • "Now whatever those ideas may produce for those countries, what I want to warn you about is that neither of those ideas can ever do anything to help our oountry in solving her own constitutional problems. They are exotic to this country; they are alien. You cannot graft them on to our system any more than you can graft a Siberian crab on to an oak. But ideas, I said, are dangerous. They travel fast, and in those countries they have perfected a machinery for mass impression and mass conscionsness. There, again, I am not criticising what they do. I only want to affirm my belief that either of them would be a terrible danger for this country. I do not ■ think this country is in danger of having a mass eonseiousness, but do not let us in our happy-go-lucky way think that such a thing cannot come to great