THE Maoriland Worker FEBRUARY 20, 1911. LABOUR PARTY POLITICS.

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 6, 20 February 1911, Page 3

THE Maoriland Worker FEBRUARY 20, 1911. LABOUR PARTY POLITICS.

The rise of the democracy in New Zealand during the last five years has had a somewhat chastening effect upon certain professional politicians, some of whom are in Parliament and some of whom ardently desire to get in. There are men who, a few years ago, were bitterly opposed to the formation of a Labour Party, but who at the next election will be found willing to admit, at the least, that "there is a great deal to be said on both sides." Their political consciences have been set to a different gear. Five years ago Labour could not find candidates to fill even the few seats it might have won. Five years hence it will not be able to find seats for the candidates who are burning to represent—or misrepresent—it in the Parliament of the nation. Probably, at next election seats will be hawked about in the Labour interest. Later on the same seats will be "sold" on the usual terms. Everybody knows that the political position in New Zealand is vastly different from what it was five years ago; everybody knows that Labour is coming into power, that the time is not so very far distant when it will "enjoy" the voting strength it has always "possessed;" and, consequently, everybody who has dabbled more or less successfully in the politics of this country is making all decent, or indecent, haste to be "converted" to the cause of democracy. All this is not in the least surprising. The seeing eye. which can tell at a glance which way the political cat is going to jump., is part of the ordinary outfit of the professional politician. But what is surprising is that the people themselves should be taking these conversions seriously. This is a grave danger. Something more than fervour of expression for the Labour cause should bo required; something a little more tried and trusty than the ardour of proselytism. But in the selection of suitable candidates Labour is face to face with a difficult problem. One choice is presented by the honest and devoted workers who have grown old in their battle for the Cause, men who have, perhaps for a quarter of a century, kept steadily and tirelessly fighting on, and who personally are at heart as loyal and as enthusiastic as ever, but who havo, nevertheless, been embittered by repeated betrayals, made violent by life-long struggling, or rendered pessimistic by continued failure—men, in a word, who lack that cheerful outlook and tactful, amiable determination which are so essential For the winning of any solid advantages in the political world, as it is at present constituted. The other choice is offered by the younger, brighter men—the men who have had the luck to be born in the foremost ranks of time, who have had placed in their hands ready-made the weapons which the past generation had slowly and painfully to forge for itself. Further, the youthful man is the favourite of Nature in all spheres of life. In athletics no principle is recognised

more clearly than this : That the actual performer in a combat, or a race, must hare youth on his side, in order to ensure the possession of a sufficiently reliable reserve of vim, virility and nerve. The function of the older athlete is that of counsellor and friend. So it is in politics. And the hope of the Democracy in this country is, first, that it has a reserve of veteran warriors., who have stood uncorrupted and incorruptible as the long years have rolled onwards; and, second, that it has growing up in its midst, and just entering into the heritage of early manhood, an army of men, warm-hearted, alert, dauntless, willing to dare all for those principles of an advanced Democracy, whose concrete name is Socialism.