A STATE ROUSED BY A NOVELIST.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10066, 6 February 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

A STATE ROUSED BY A NOVELIST.

"Winston Churchill has done more harm to the good name of Xew Hampshire- than ten thousand Jethro Basses could have accomplished." These words uttered by a Democratic leader in the Xew Hampshire Legislature are taken by Mr Stanley Johnson as the highest possible tribute to the novelist's "service in awakening the conscience of the voters." It furtiler serves, this writer avers in The World's Work, as "an impressive illustration of the power that- Mr Churchill has exerted in the affairs of a State, both by his latest novels and by lending his o«m personality as a weapon in the fight for better and purer political, administration." We Tead further: "'Coniston' and "Air Crewe's Career' form the two parts of a literary unit. The trilogy will be complete when Mr Churchill shall have written another novel telling the story of complete political reform. The value of the two novels lies not alone in the illumination .given to conditions in 2*ew Hampshire. The same battle is going on in other States, where citizens are endeavoring to elect men who will obey the wishes of the voters. Mr Churchill's mission is a national one. Xew Hampshire is mainly composed of small towns and villages whose inhabitants are by nature prejudiced against outside interference and have small respect for 'literary fellers' as candidates for office. It was quite surprising, therefore, that Mr . Churchill's candidacy for the nomination for Governor, in 1*906, gained rapid progress in the coarse of the six weeks before the Republican nominating convention. -As a matter of fact his audiences forgot- him, while listening to his story of the misrule of twenty years. But the disclosures of the novelists campaign roused the people. Xew Hampshire campaigns had generally been too quietly prepared beforehand to treat the voter in the ranks to the pleasure of a political thrill. There can be little doubt that had the choice of a governor been submitted direct to the voters, without the machinery of a nominating convention, whose integrity has been severely criticised, Mr Churchill would have been elected. The old leaders barely saved themselves from disaster, and found themselves thoroughly disorganised and badly out of temper" with each. other. His achievement, even in defeat, was sufficient to attract the notice of reformers in other States, and he went to New Jersey to aid Senator Everett Colby. Starting as the Representative in the Legislature of the little village of Cornish, "Mr Churchill's political power had thus outgrown the limits of the State in which it was born." In Xew Hampshire, we are told, a new and effective force has been brought into play in politics through the agency of Mr Churchill's two novels. The people had been unfamiliar with the contents of their railroad commissioner's reports and their statute books, it is said, but ''Mr Crewe's Career"' has educated them. The books have practically forced the novelist into another role, as- these words show: It is impossible now to divorce Mr Churchill the novelist from Mr Churchill the public man—they are mingled together in his books and in his speeches on the stump. But he is not a mere critic of ■political conditions. He does not wish to destroy, but to upbuild. He has frequently declared the l>elief that his own party "can furnish the remedy: and, while many of his followers have bolted, he has remained in its ranks. He has laid strong stress upon his belief in his attack upon the dominance of corporation Tule in his own State, that if the people could have !>een entrusted 1 with the proper confidence due their sovereignty, there-would have never been any complaint on the part of the publie-se/vice companies." '