WANT OF CONFIDENCE.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3514, 28 June 1920, Page 4

WANT OF CONFIDENCE.

I So serious has the political situation, become that, in face of the strong party supporting the Government, the Hon. W. D. S. MacDonald regards the country's position with such gravity as ! to deem it his duty to move a want Jof confidence motion. Like Canning, I Mr Massey magniioquently boasted that he had called a new progress into existence, but it is now notorious that his regime is rioted only for its capacity of incurring debts. History furnishes ample experience to be availed of; anyone who has read Peel's ''What is a pound,' r and studied how that Statesman put currency on a sound basis, and cheapened food for the masses of the people in times equally stressful as these iu so far as they press .„ ; s Dominion, will arrive at Jthe conclusion that a want of confidence motion has come none too soon. Members who have consistently supported Mr Massey in the past are now convinced that the country is faced with two issues only, political evolu (ion and political revolution, and, although want of confidence may not be carried, there will undoubtedly be a freedom of discussion and a division that can only result in great benefit to the whole body politic. The spread of anarchy will never be checked by the growth of millionaires on one hand and the conditions described by Miss Martineau and Kingsley on the other. The former stating that children of country labourers struggled with pigs for their food in the day and huddled together on damp straw under a leaky thatch at night, while the great Kingsley sung of the workers being worse housed and fed than, the Squire's hogs, hordes, dogs and sheep. They told no fairy tales, for British Poor Law Commissioners reported to Parliament that workers were being turned into paupcrg and women were being demoralised by legislative enactment. We claim that similar processes are at work at. this minute in this country: they have not readied the stage they did in Britain and they are not likely to do so for people are too well educated to allow the strength and cunning of capitalism to again enslave them. Cobden exhorted Bright ever

I the death bed of his young wife to j r.'sfue homo' in the country in which j wives and children were dying of hunger. Such an extreme is riot possible in this Dominion, but ran the increasing demand for houses in which to live lie neglected with political safety? Can Mr Massey say with Pee!, as stated by Disraeli, when Mr MacDonald's want of confidence motion is Under discussion, "It may be that I shall leave ' a name, sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in those plaees which are' the abodes of men, whose lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow —a name remembered with goodwill when they shall re-create their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened with a sense of

injustice." Peel saw the national strength being sapped by starvation, and to-day we realise that national security is being sacrificed in the scramble of strength and cunning to grab the greater part of this country's wealth between the land from which it is raised and the people who require it in keeping up the national stamina. Peel, in his day, removed taxation from food, the New Zealand Government has gone en increasing taxation on necessaries of life till it has become a national scandal, and a political and social danger. It seems that Members of Parliament are now realising what must result from a dwindling production and an amazingly increasing expenditure, otherwise the Hon. Mr. MacDonald would not have ventured upon a want of confidence attack.