PARTIZAN POLITICS.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 535, 19 June 1880, Page 2

PARTIZAN POLITICS.

The Prime Minister, according to a Wanganui journal, is in office but not in power. This kind of trifling with facts is pitiful spitefulncss. Politicians who don’t fight fair are undeserving of sympathy. Why should sensible men surrender their judgment, stultify their sense of right and wrong, by supporting a political party through “ thick and thin?” The mere partizan in politics is a nuisance. He is not honest in his own eyes because he gives up his conscience to his party. He is not honest in other people’s eyes because they know that the mere partizan has no independent judgment, and is therefore not to be trusted. Yet it is the partizan who makes most noise in politics. It is he who calls other persons foul names ; says they are liars and swindlers; and brawls in his speeches like a termagant fishwife. A little learning is a dangerous thing—in politics. It leaves the man uncultured, unenlightened, unliberalised in his ideas ; but it puts into his hands the mischievous power of vituperating, and slandering, and exhibiting in the senate the wretched habits of the gaming-house. Politicians of this sort are a hindrance to the honest progress of a young nation. They lower the tone of public life. They make politics a bye-word and a scoff. They render it almost impossible for highest intelligence in the colony to enter the lists with them for the discussion of principles of government. Their idea of government is co-operative jobbery in Office, and howling abuse in Opposition. The partizan politician is on both sides of . the House, and his malefic influence is the bane of New Zealand government.