THE GHOST OF A GHOST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 398, 16 June 1908, Page 4

THE GHOST OF A GHOST.

A ghost—especially a “Turnip Ghost”—counts for little in these days of scepticism. At what figure, then, is the ghost of a ghost to be assessed ? That is the sort of spectre which Mr James Allen has seen (says the Evening Post), and the horror of it was in him when he spoke at Milton recently. With bated breath he told the audience about a hobgoblin that was coming to snap all marriage lies, break up the families, and shatter the churches, and the ghost of a ghost would survey the havoc and the holocaust, the ruin and the change, with a horrible laugh, a spectral, sepulchral guffaw of such a kind as wells from the mouth of the arch-villain of a melo-drama. What will New Zealand’s 2000 daily accredited Socialists think of the fear that makes Mr James Allen and the Farmers’ Union shudder so pitiably ? By the utterances of various politicians lately, one would imagine that New Zealand was on the eve of falling into the hands of hordes of red-capped, red-handed, sansculottes, bent on smashing the country’s backbone into unrecognisable fragments. It is time that more sense and less humour tinged the criticisms of the Socialists’ aspiration. Revolutionary Socialists are no more than a soap-box force in this country, and even the soapbox is not at many corners ; bi.t the few imflammatory comrades are magnified by excited imaginations into mighty armies.