The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1919 COLONISING BLUNDERS REPEATED.

Taihape Daily Times, 4 January 1919, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1919 COLONISING BLUNDERS REPEATED.

(With, which is Incorporated The Tai* hape Po»t t,ad WalcjaU'lo Newa).,

As a colonising power Britain has no compeer, yet there is not a historian that has not, or would not, state that her operations have been lamentably short of perfection. The vein of failure in British colonising statesmanship consists, and has consisted, of a thin strata of overreaching imperialists who have the notion that they possessed a right, not only to found colonies, but that they also had the inherent right to dictate the foreign and domestic policy of the people who develop them. It is the remnant of ancient feudalism that still runs in the veins of such imperialists, noticeable in the persistence with which when in possession of governing power In Britain they cannot restrain their lordly impulses; they cause discontent and sow seeds of * disintegration which arc calculated to produce trees bearing fruit disastrously contrary tc what their diseased or limited intelligences had any conception of. Yesterday’s cables gave two regrettable instances of British Government interference with what should should have been the common and exclusive right of the Dominions affected to deal with. Why the /dying Ispirit lof feudalism in Britain should go on persisting in trying to force a titled aristocracy on New Zealand is inexplicable, a perplexing enigma, and why the people of this young country permits the British Government to scatter iFs i patents of nobility to do the lording j over them is, to say the least, incom- , prehensible, unless it is that thereby i it is hoped and intended that the old | lord ''and serf conditions may be kept alive. An unwarranted interference with the domestic policy of South Africa Las apparently raised the ire of General Botha, in whom free peo- | pies have no more genuine and gencri ous advocate and friend. It is said that the Government in Pretoria is developing a tondenej'- to advocate a greater measure of autocracy, and is hinting at far-reaching changes in the direction of what General B'otha, in a recent interview in London, termed “constitutional readjustments.” South Africa rightly resents a British Treasury Committee dictating to its Government bow it shall control the development of the country’s goldmining, and there is similar resentment against the British Education Commission’s statement regarding the encouragement of students from Overseas. The South African press says its own Parliament must be the sole arbiter of the fate of the, gold industry in the interests of South Africa exclusively, and it is reasonably and justly contended that the youth of South Africa should shape their study so as to become South Africans, and not Englishman or other Europeans. It is not statesmen and others in power who Lave an innate consuming love and admiration for thei country that gave them birth

who are preaching dangerous policy | with respect to overseas dominions, it j is rather those who have been reared j in a commdreial Ist atmosphere and ' who have imbibed the notion that I everything is right so long as there is the might and opportunity to bring j to bear, and even the America of to- | day is no object lesson to them of ' the shortsightedness and folly of i interfering for purposes of gain with 1 the colonising off-shoots in other ' lands. The class who would dictate I to South Africa and heap a contemptibly silly aristocracy upon Now Zealand is that class who in former years drove away the Pilgrim Fathers aboard the Mayflower to America, and it is the persistence in an ancient civilisation that keeps millions of acres of Britain’s best land untilled, as parks and shooting grounds, while human destitution and wretchedness is forcing the people to get away to one or other of the oversea settlements. Not content with driving them out by cruel heartless starvation, but the shadow of feudalism must follow them and endeavour to plant amongst them the old aristocratic conditions which were the curse that made them exiles in wild, foreign harms. England is far from being overcrowded, even in these later years; her broad acres, if all were tilled, would maintain in comfort many millions more people, and yet the little band aboard the Mayflower, of whom President Wilson is

the present day representative and spokesman, sailed away to sock justice and freedom in a foreign land, in a new continent. The battle chant of that new democracy to those in England is worth repeating; to those they left behind they said, "True, true, in our land we are worsted, our own beautiful land ye have reft from us, we have been a people peeled and scattered from the beginning. You have torn from us field and homef stead, and farm, and have the price of Justice and the worship of the merciful matters so costly, that ye in effect declare that justice and religion arc not for the poor. We leave ye. The kingdom we raise across the deep shall bo unstained by your raurai mcrics and cajolings, the thefts of taxation, the fraud of primogeniture and entail. Hunger and priestcraft and State cunning, and tithes and monopoly, these shall not be omnipresent. Freedom and justice are building their homes in the woods of the new world.” The American colony has fought for its right to be free of the old State mummeries and cajolings, of taxation thefts; justice and freedom they would have in preference to life itself The spirit of British feudalism sought to follow those old American colonists with its taxation thefts, its State mummeries, cajolings, and aristocratic titles, but the apostles of freedom and justice would have none of them; they realised that the very incompatibles of freedom and justice were being insidiously forced upon them and they resented them with their lives, and what a glorious superstructure stands to-day upon the foundation of that freedom and justice laid by the old Pilgrim Fathers. Wc have the founding of a civilisation to-day; is it going to be damned by the tawdry mummeries and titles of a social state that produces a people of broken physique? South Africans, with General Botha at their head, are resenting the meddling of British State Mummers and taxation thieves; they claim the right to work out their own destiny in their own way, and refuse to be dictated to by Britain as to how they shall develop their industries and how their children shall be educated. The German ways of proselytising they will not have from Britain, and every member of >a true democracy will applaud the attitude of General Botha, the South African Government, and Press. The conj sciences of men in New Zealand, and elsewhere, who accept titles and patents of nobility from any other body of men j be they British, German, or of any j other nationality, are inscrutable —past | understanding. 'Are such decorations j accepted by the recipients with a be- | lief that they are superior to their j fellows?' We are inclined to the view j that the broadcasting of such titles is j one of the greatest menaces to the j establishment of a democracy based on j j freedom and justice, that shall prosper j j as the great American democracy has j j prospered until ii shall be able to send : | its millions of free men to save its i parent land from the hand of the Teutonic or any other despoiler and enslaver. The American democracy is the admiration of the world, and let us not refuse to understand what the words of Mr Lloyd George may moan to the future of New Zealand if they are allowed to go- unheeded; Britain has to bow its head in shame in the presence of Germany and Turkey. Lot the people of this young country take to heart the lesson and cut away at once from the insidious and insinuat- , big interference of State mummers and taxation thieves. Ti*e greatest I enemies of Britain are those who are responsible for the submerged tenth, as it is termed, the huge class TT' broken physique that have to be kept by those who work, in addition to that ever-growing army of Idle rich who are parasites on those who till the land and produce the i°ai esrer.ee °t a nation’s greatness.