Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24 1908. CLASS LEGISLATION.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4340, 24 November 1908, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24 1908. CLASS LEGISLATION.

This above all—to thine own self be true , And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man Shakespeare.

To the unreflecting, the term classlegislation probably conveys no idea much beyond the advantage of one class being secured at the expence of another class. This is an inadequate and dangerously misleading term. No class of our complicated modern society can possibly arrive at the goal of its most complete good by any method which sacrifices the interests of any other class or classes. This is of course a .mere truism, and has been so abundantly proved by the records of history that even to mention it may seem superfluous if not even gratutious. But, with the second ballots for Election so near, we make no apology for drawing attention to it, for the most patent facts have a curious way of being overlooked, when questions affecting personal interest are on the carpet—as they always are at election times. Somebody has said that a fault of Carlyle was that he could not keep away from obvioys facts. But then Carlyle had such a way of getting hold of facts that had become even trite perhaps in their entire obviousness, and making them appear as alive as though they were his own discovery. And if there is one obvious fact which requires some vitalizing power put into it just now, it certainly is this fact of the total impossibility of the perfect advancement of the interests of any one class, upon principles which do not include the advancement of the interests of the Dominion as a whole. If politicians are going about to secure the vote of the labouring, or rather jthe employed classes (for every man is a worker in the Dominion) by promising to introduce legislation which is to jeopardize the interests of invested capital, or the interests of invested labour (which is the capital of the small land owner and land cultivator) then such politicians are not to be entrusted with the interests even of those whom they are professing to serve. Likewise if candidates for parliament are appealing to the agricultural classes by promising them a tariff which shall act detrementally upon the manufacturing industries, they are simply promising a thing which will react upon the farmers themselves.

If they are prepared to vouchsafe

stite assistance to the thriftless and improvident at the expense of those thrifty souls who, while they would not think of beating down their gar lener or charwomen in their wages, would yet look askance at the sorts of expenditure which are i reall/ common among the working I classes in the Dominion, if politic- . ians are promising to do this sort of | thing then they had better be sent a iout their own business, and not | allowed to wreck the Dominion’s business prospects. It is a fact of I common observation that your charwomen will readily go to the store and buy what her more economical mistress would manufacture for herself, at much less proportionate cost. And it is an undeniable fact that those whom we regard as poor will indulge in personal display which those in a higher social grade would not feel that they could afford. If instead of catering for the popular vote by promising the public just what its own untrained judgment leads it to demand, some of our candidates would strive to guide and form a sound public sense of what it is right and sensible to demand, and promise to strive t 3 achieve that, why when we should “ Advance New Zealand ” reduced to an accomplished fact on a far grander scale than has yet been the case. The hindrance to the realisation of such a dream of course would be the public unwillingness to accept the doctrine of a man who did not immediately promise it the moon. We boast of our free public education, (and be it freely admitted we have much to be congratulated upon here) but unless as a people we become better acquainted with the principles of economics, and more fit to judge as the validity of the claims to our confidence of those who ask us for our votes at election times, not basing our calculations upon a blind appreciation of our own immediate profit, why then we shall prove to the world at large how eggregiously unfit we are to exercise the franchise. One could almost be led to suggest that an educational test in elementary economics and ethics ought to be applied to every claimant for the franchise. To some such a suggestion may at the present time appear a wild idea. But in a few generations, when every boy and girl has had educational opportunities such as some of our oldtimers never dreamed of, it might be deemed reasonable that only those who had proved themselves capable of judging at least of the soundness or unsoundness of any candidate’s views, should be allowed to exercise a vote. We have been all too slow in walking up to the tremendous responsibility of our exercise of the franchise, and it would be very well if it could be claimed for us that we were really avoid of information on matters affecting our national wellbeing, as Burke declared the Americans to be voracious for legal information.