The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1919 AN INVERTED MORAL VISION

Taihape Daily Times, 14 February 1919, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1919 AN INVERTED MORAL VISION

(?With which is Incorporated The Taihnpe Post «-nd WalEsasl'jo Newn').

The speech put into the hands of His Majesty the King for deliverance at the assembling 'of the British Parliament has in it many i pew features, and yet it is not entirely free from that evidence that property is still thought to be superior to person. His Majesty asks Parliament to give its earnest consideration to industrial problems; that the gifts of leisure and prosperity may be more generally shared throughout the community. His Majesty appealed to the House to do all in its power to revive and foster a happier and more harmonious spirit in our national and industrial life. It was hoped in Britain and, in fact, throughout the Empire, that some indication would be given in the speech from the throne of the nature of steps the new British Parliament were proposing to take to wipe away the causes of national and industrial unrest, but through the King, Parliament has merely appealed to itself to do something to, while firmly maintaining security for property and person, spare no effort in healing the causes of existing unrest. Such phraseology may mean almost anything, for the history -of government in Britain has instilled if into the very fibre of British people that the law has invariably been interpreted in favour of property to the almost utter disregard of the person. Sydney Taylor tells us of a British Parliament sitting and debating, and determining on the boiling of a man to death for poison, and the man was boiled in Smithfield "by act of Parliament. In e act> ’an harking back over the history of government one is compelled to. wonder whether the awful sum total of judicial cruelty and injustice does not make a more acute and abiding impression on the mind than that of .all the most horrid tales of rapine, revenge, murder and massacre of the criminal classes, high and low. Truly, a fearful volume would the history of judicial cruelty make; there would be the seventy-two thousand thieves strung up on roadsides in the reign of Henry Tudor, the burnings to death of hundreds in the reigns of two famous queens, the star chamber, screw and rack, right down to comparatively recent times when, in the reign of the third George, women were burnt for coining and for the impossible crime of witchcraft; when worn-out weather-beaten soldiers were hung for begging in the streets; when the crime of stealing the value of five shillings or upwards was invariably punished by death. The history of executive justice, or executive malice is a painful compendium. Some awful and distre«sing mistake seems to have pervaded British larv-making a»d administration; the moral vision of British, larv-makers and judges has been inverted, and we realise from an inkling of the old familiar phraseology; in the speech from the throne just delivered by the King that there are still extant evidences that the nation’s moral vision has not recovered its natural equilibrium. For the real understanding of much of the state language of an indefinite and enigmatical character used on state occasions in these later days w t c must have recourse to history, to experiences of the past. No further history than that of the war not yet closed is needed to furnish a compendious narration of the wrongs of the mases of the people, and still there are moral visions designedly and wilfully inverted that will not view conditions of life as they are, and ■they disastrously fail In scorrcctly

computing the results of their foil/

on the future of :he nation. As the act of Charles in. cancelling feudatory obligations and the sudden abolftion monasteries' '.by Henry broadcasted poverty and its national sequence, crime, so the present day laws which permit the people to be legally robbed to the verge of starvation that those with power may accumulate millions, are producing their crop of anarchists, bolsheviks and malcontents, right down through the justly maddened industrial organisations. whose members are offered no rational view of improvement. The riches of the world raised by labour are being filched by those who, empowered by the laws made i,y cur men of inverted moral vision, greedily go on grabbing millions Avhilc labour, according to Mr Lloyd George, are starving to death, illhoused, illfod until they are physical wrecks. It is the same old power and greed of Charles, and Henry Tudor that is in operation now, and which is the skuse of all the industrial strife the Empire and the world is experiencing. If fall and decline of the Empire is to be averted a bold course must be taken. The Empire hoped for a King’s message to Parliament that would have instilled hope, but it is apparent that as little as possible is to be done in the people’s interests and that little is to be always subject to considerations of security to property first and person second. Whatever may be said in extenuation of the acts of the unfranchised mascs in rising against their oppressors in the past, therecan be nothing rational advanced in excuse of violence and strikes at this time when every man and woman, rich and poor, has an equal voice and vote in selecting the parliament to govern them. Risings of minorities can now justly be suppressed by law even if force is needed. The very fact of the rising is proof of a minority desiring to have recourse to violence to break the law, because if it constituted, or represented the majority it is only necessary to cast votes at a general election that will result in casting out from the temple of law the oppressors, extortioners and the robbers who have' been the cause of . such disastrous widespread injustice. Labour in New Zealand has no excuse or occasion for hampering or destroying the Government by acts of violence, and so long as it resorts to violent methods while it has the power absolute to acquire sir there is to obtain peacefully, legally and honourably through the ballot box, it will not gain the support of any but those ‘extremists who would not hesitate to flout the law only for fear of the consequences. Revolutionists curse the ballot because it is a bar to the 'exercise of their sanguinary anarchical propensities, /but i he ballot is the most sacred institution labour can command, for it whirls out the profiteer, the leech on their industry at one end, and the blood-stained revolutionist who would institute a- regime of destruction of life .and concreted labour at the, other. People'of this little country will await with the utmost concern for what the Governor’s Speech has to disclose at. tiro next calling together of the New Zealand parliament. Exasperated people want concreted proposals for future progress and improvement from their own point of view; the day for inane appeals in the language that has come down through British history as being customary by governing classe who strictly guarded their governing privileges against attacks by the masses of the people, is past. The distribution of privileges and responsibilities have, however, become so outrageously unjust that nothing can save thee world from revolution, but there is no reason whatever why the revolution in New Zealand should not be a perfectly peaceful transition from one condition to another, the ballot box is the medium.