Thoughts for the times

Hokitika Guardian, 8 September 1924, Page 2

Thoughts for the times

Tun Political AVni.in

‘•()ur parties are never destroyed by their adversaries: their fall is always their own work. Charles I. made the Commonwealth and the Army, and the Puritans made the Restoration: then Charles 11. and James IT. made the Revolution, and the AVhig Junto made the Tory Ministry of Harley and Boliugbroke. and they in their turn made the long AVhig rule of the eighteenth century. And so on all through till to-day. There is always a great body middle opinion, and it is swayed much more by repulsion than by attra'tfon. Victory constantly tittcnds its swing as it revenges itsell upon the Coalition of I7S:’>. upon the narrow Toryism of Wellington and Eldon, upon tbo ‘plundering and blundering’ of Gladstone, upon the Jingoism <>f Dis-r.-mli. There lias .-clilnm teen any need to remind Conservatism, which is an anxious creed and temper, that its oncmv is alive, and potentially \ot> dangerous. . • Palmerston, though nominally a Whig, governed as a Tory. , Clad lon., lanceedetl llilll. Por.Msui • apnliy reinel \s the extravagances of Fox put the Tories in power for fifty years, so those of Gladstone were the direct cause of the twenty years’ Conservative ascendancy between ISSS and 11*15.” London “Times”.