Moderate Men.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 February 1921, Page 4

Moderate Men.

\ (Sydney Morning Herald.) i Huxley, when it was suggested at a Royal Society dinner that he should j | enter Parliament, replied that all his • life he had been consumed by a passion for the discoverey of truth; not for its obscuration. In his preface to a wellI known sociological work, Viscount I Bryce stated: “I am myself an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as, indeed, politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky be can.” The observations of these distinguished men fairly summarise the attitude of the average man to the political position torday. Society, through a perversion of that democracy which was to be the expression of the general will/has been divided into two hostile camps—a state which, the sociologists tell us, is the first step downwards to social disintegration. The main method for the adjustment of grievances is assumed to be in the capturing of the control of the State. At the one extreme, this furnishes a vision of power to “expropriate”—everyone, not intimately connected with the expropriator. At the other end of the scale, control of the state means power to crush the expropriator and to protect the interests whose downfall is sought. For these purposes truth is perverted, the passions of the mob are 5 inflamed ; and, on the day of reckoning, a general disillusionment comes through the incapacity of the present system of government as an instrument of reform and progress. One “class” endeavours to control all other “classes;” all legislation, tends to become class legislation ; and chaos results. The position of moderate, thoughtful people in this welter of hate is, indeed, a sorry one. They find no place in the secret committee rooms, from which the party leaders endeavour to pull the strings which work their puppets, and from which, if the puppets begin to show signs of being thoughtful, modeintc men, they crack the whip. Neither can find wisdom in the catch phrases of the hustings. In time they seek aloofness, and sink into apathy and indifference. Their vote is, of course, sought, but once the need for it has passed they are invited to make themselves scarce and to take their old-fashioned ideas with them. This unorganised body of moderate opinion is, apparently, destined to play the part of a buffer in the conflict of classes. The moderate man in the world to-day is like a rudderless ship m a storm-swept sea, a prey to the drifts and currents. In other words, he lacks leadership. John Stuart Mill and bis contemporaries foresaw Ibis when then specified the two contributing factors without which “completely popular government” could not hope to justify its claim, as being the continuous political education of the masses and enlightened leadership. Have these conditions been fulfilled? Bather has not political organisation —as a well-known Australian writer on social subjects has phrased it—come to depend on sectional distrust, and the successful exploitation of the irrational emotions? The mechanical aspect of political organisation, to “ quote the same writer, .has been perfected; its living inspiration lias vanished.

The people of this State, during the past week or two, have been witnesses of one of those conflicts which do so much to discredit representative government. A small body ol men, sitting in secret conclave, has shown the mailed fist to the Government in an endeavour to force adherence to its wishes in every detail of the application of certain principles. The various matters involved in this conflict need not concern us here. The main point is that the incident foreshadows the inevitable conflict between two classes—the one seeking to destroy society in order that the general freedom ol may be exchanged to-morrow for the autocracy of the proletariat, the other, realising that only in a spirit of goodwill and co-opera-tion can the affairs of the world again lie set on the right track. A rift was threatened in the Labour lute, but the danger appears now to have been averted. Sooner or later, however, the lilt must come. What, then, will be the position of that vast body of moderate Labour opinion? Unorganised and without enlightened leadership, it may leave tile path for the extremist clear. There is no doubt that a largo proportion of the voters of the State would welcome the advent of a middle party, which, while repudiating the anarchic doctrines of Karl Marx, would, nevertheless, be moved by ideals of social service in their highest expression. A neutral party—if that is-not a contradiction in terms —shbuld its outlook become broadened, might form the nucleus of such an organisation. A body, however, whose constitution prevents alliances of any kind, and which would compel all comers to merge their identity in its own, cannot expect to play any very conspicuous part in such a movement. A conservative party tending to extremes, even with strong leadership and education of the people as to its true ideals, might for a time til 1 the I,reach ; hut in this, as in so much besides, as Aristotle long ago insisted, all extremes are wrong. In the moderate men of our political parties the hopes ol the future must be placed. Some day the position will have to lie faced by every working man. The need ol today is a realisation of the importance of being earnest. There must be earnestness in the desire to understand economic problems so that the fallacies and clap-trap of the “class-war” may be exposed ; earnestness in the desire to give true expression to the idea of representative government, and to ensure that its functions may not he perverted to the ends of any group of plotters. In Australia we enjoy freedom unparalleled in the world. It is in the hands of the moderate man to see that it is not filched from him, lest he become a hewer of wood and drawer of water for the Lenins and Trotskys ol this Commonwealth.