THE WELFARE LEAGUE.

Shannon News, 6 October 1922, Page 3

THE WELFARE LEAGUE.

(To the Editor.)

.sir,—May I trouble you once rhore, there being a query 1 would like to put to the Welfare League: If our policy of allowing land to be sold only to the. State is confiscation, why did their party give power under the Public Works Act to take a man’s land under the same method? They are not game to advocate the repeal of the powers conferred. That Baliance never advocated such a system is absurd. If lie did not, why did the League’s newspapers and politicians always icier to him as a “confiscator,” a Socialist, and worse, and his Ministry as “the Seven Devils of Socialism”? Look up the Wanganui Herald (Ballance’s own paper/ of those times and you will see all about both it and lire great Statesman’s self-reliant policy. Seddon practically advises the same thing in his last, message to the workers of Australia: “So great is the money power, so great, is jts grip even on New Zealand, holding as it does the means of life—tiie tools whereby men toil, the food whereon men live —that there is no single act, however originally intended for the benefit of the workers, but has been turned into a means and an aid for bringing more wealth to the already wealthy classes, and leaving an ever lessening share to those whole Labour produced that wealth.” To give the people a sample of the hatred the Leagued party had of Bab lance in those days, I handed a prominent member of the then National Association (to day he is a prominent ReJormer) a newspaper extra announcing his death, and, after reading, he remarked: “Good! all I want now is to. jump on the grave.’' Good-bye, Mr Welfare League, we go before the electors quite happy, with your crowd, the P.P.A., the Catholic Fed., the Press, the Pubs, and the Parasites arrayed against the everincreasing army of useful people.—l am. etc., J. W. THOMPSON.