MR MILLAR’S POSITION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 76, 26 March 1912, Page 4

MR MILLAR’S POSITION.

Many people naturally are wondering why Mr Millar was passed over in the selection of a new Leader by the Liberal Party. The Wellington “Post” goes into this matter and attempts an explanation /hs follows:—“How then has Mr Millar been passed over? The luck lias been against him, but he has also himself to blame. We ascribe it mostly to the malice of fortune 'that one who was a pioneer in the Labour cause more than twenty years ago, when the status of a Labour agitator was not the respectable thing that it is now, should have had to encounter the bitter hostility of Labour just when the highest prize jf politics seemed to be within his reach. No Labour leader ’in this country has ever had to show the courage, the nerve, and the' determination that Mr Millar’s responsibility for the great maritime strike of 1890 demanded of him. A few years later' he was representing the workers in Parliament, and until he took office he remained their most conspicuous Parliamentary champion. But office brought the inevitable estrangement. The obligations of a Minister of the Crown are different from those of the secretary of a Labour Union, and the conflict resulted in suspicion, ill-will, and . charges of bad faith. ; The bitter hostility of the British Labour Patty to Mr John .Burns presents a parallel case. Friends ‘who have fallen out become too often the. worst of enenfies. ‘You shall read,’ jsaid ah' Italian, statesman' hhoni his ' contemporaries alegar,defl as the, incarI nation of ( Mgchiavelli’s , Princfi,. ‘that . we mre ieominahded to fbrgiye : iour;eheniiesj but you’‘never 1 redd tjnjtiweare ' c'oih'manded to forgive our friends.’ Mr Millar has never been forgiven by his friends in the Labour Party, and to their implacable hostility and the opposition of the partisans of Prohibition his disappointment must be in large part attributed. But, as we have said, he Has also himself to 'blaihe:' "'His are ; h'dd 'bfoiight ; tlieir full weight, to - bear He could have’ made himself indispenSable toi his party, • and worn down ! all -sectional ;opposition; ' but. this he ’ has, failed to do. The impression of vigour which he made when he first took office has not' been sustained, .and he has recently given but fitful displays of the, remarkable Parliamentary power with which he won golden opinions by his management of the Tariff Bill in 1907. The man who in our opinion is best qualified by nature and by experience to lead the Liberal Party cannot throw all the blame on to fortune for his failure to realise his ambition.”