"HONEST IDEALISTS."

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 17 April 1919, Page 3

"HONEST IDEALISTS."

Since the Rev. Knowles Kempton told an Auckland audience that "as a result of honest and candid enquiry he believed that Lenin and Trotzky were honest idealists, men who were seeking to solve the problem of their time honestly and justly," he has come in for a good deal of adverse criticism. And this is hardly surprising. One can excuse a professional agitator for sympathising with riff-raff like ..the Bolshevist leadeis nameel, because he presumably knows no better. But for a clergyman, a man of culturo and education to side with such scum is, as Dick Swivoller would say, "an unmitigated staggerer." And in referring to the in the papers about the Bolshevists Mr Kempton told us that many of these messages " he felt, to be untrue," What, as somebody has just been asking the editor of one of our dailies, has the reverend gentleman's feelings got to do with the matter? How can he feel a thing to be true or false? It is simply amazing that apologists can be fund in any decent and civilised community for blood-thirsty, cruel and vindictive monsters such a,s Lenin and Tro.tzky for whom hanging is far too good.