WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 February 1917, Page 7

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Government on its own motion should .not bo forgotten.

11ELIGI0N AND WAR. ' Wellington, Feb. 10. In dealing with a deputation from the Seventh Day Adventists which waited upon him yesterday to urge that the members of the sect it represented should not be required to bear arms the Minister of Defence displayed a measure of tact and patience with which no one would have credited him a couple of years ago. The Adventists, good earnest people who live up to their conscientious convictions, object to working on Saturday, which they regard as the Sabbath Day, as well as to fighting on any day of the week; but they are ready to undertake ambulance work, provided their views concerning the Sabbath are respected, and they do not \h to lean on other people for protection from the German peril. This frank attitude evidently appealed to Sir James Allen, and though he could not promise the members of the deputation that no ambulance work would be required on Saturdays, unless they could persuade the Kaiser to cease shooting on the seventh day of. the week, or that the Military Eoard would exempt their pastors from service, he managed to send them away feeling they had poured the troubles of their .principals into tolerant, if not very sympathetic ears,

MR. WEBB'S CHALLENGE. Mr. P. C. Webb's offer to submit himself to the judgment of his constituents forthwith if he can be shown a thousand of them* are dissatisfied with his attitude towards the war, is not attracting a great deal of attention here. AVhether the member for Grey attends send-offs to soldiers, with or without invitations, is not regarded by the local people as a matter of much consequence. But there is a feeling even among the more aggressive members of the Labor some of their representatives in Parliament are disposed to make a little too much of the assistance they gave in obtaining better conditions for the men sent to the front and for their dependents. Mr. Webb and Mr. McCombs strongly denounced the first proposals but the credit for leading the attack belongs to Mr. Poland, the member for Ohinemuri, who was warmly supported' by a score of Liberal members, and it was Sir Joseph Ward, then sitting on the Opposition benches, who finally induced the Government to reconsider its scale of pensions and allowances. ThU does not detract from the good work actually done by Mr. Webr> and his colleague, but the facts on record in "Hensard" ought to be remembered and the concessions since the National

POLITICAL UNITY. This morning- the New Zealand Times takes the prohibitionists of Invercargill severely to task for having suggested the discontinuance of the sale of liquor during the course of the war. "In the midst of war," it says, "when the energies of the nation and its whole attention should be concentrated against the enemy, these people have raised the most acute cause of disscntion known in the whole political field." The contention of the writer is that anyone who introduces a controversial issue into the political arena at the present juncture is a traitor to his country. But many people who are neither prohibitionists nor politicians are expressing strong dissent from this view. Thoy maintain that the party truce offers an unexampled opportunity for the discussion of many controversial questions hhiea ought to be settled by the judgment of individual members of Parliament and not by the mandate of the party leaders. They insist that in no other British country are great domestic questions being so utterly neglected as they are in New Zealand and' they predict that when the war is over the Dominion, which once led the van of progress, will find itself hopelessly behind the re3t of the Empire.