DISEASED POLITICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 221, 30 December 1910, Page 7

DISEASED POLITICS.

To the Editor. 1 Sir, —With some people politics is a religion; with others it is a business; while with, others again it is a disease. The two former have certainly not much to recommend them, but the latter is one of the most disastrous forces known to the political world, insomuch that it is incurable. The person so afflicted suffers from a moral and ethical wasting until he may be defined as a being with a few instincts upon legs, breatli contagion. It se?ms to be one of the penalties of greatness that big men are ever singled out for attack by the sewer rats, whose only weapon is the stench of their abode. To these hybrids nothing is sacred. All known laws of political warfare are cast to the winds. No charge is too hot or too heavy to be hurled at an opponent, and the wildest flight of a diseased imagination could picture nothing which a political rival did not or would not do. I am not a blind follower of Sir Joseph Ward, and have heaved a disrespectful brick at his policy of boom and bluff before, and, should occasion arise, I shall do so again. Personally, I regard him as a greal; democrat spoiled through being allowed to run toseed.. ,In point of ability, he is head and shoulders above anything on either side of the House, but his political methods incline one to the belief that he .is a compound of Pitt and Dick Turpin. For cool, unscrupulous bluff the Dreadnought incident stands for the highwater mark of South Sea politics, while the confidence trick with which he gagged the Press in connection with the matter would have made a swell motorman hide his diminished head. Had there been anyone in the House capable of extending 'him it is possible that (Sir Joseph Ward would have registered a niche in the column of fame that would have taken some beating. As it is, he will only be remembered as an affable and kindly-disposed gentleman who represented this country with credit abroad, and who used to walk complacently about the premises at Home and listen with fatherly indulgence to the chortling of political fledglings and display a penchant for giving away Dreadnoughts and ra-i&ng loans. But it seems a commentary upon the general cussedness of things that a man who has well and honorably upheld the fair name of Maoriland the world over should be made the target of mud-slinsrers at his own doors. —I am, etc., FRANK BELL. Toko, December 28.