AN APOLOGY FOR DISLOYALTY.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 November 1921, Page 4

AN APOLOGY FOR DISLOYALTY.

The president of the Taranaki Workers’ Council (Mr. G. T. Scott)', when presiding on Saturday at the smoke concert tendered to the delegates attending the conference at New Plymouth, thought fit to substitute the toast of “The Land We Live In” for the customary loyal toast of “The King”. This is a free country, and gives ample scope for the exercise of eccentricities that aim at notoriety of one sort or another, so that if this Labor official thought fit to outrage the custom which is usually so highly honored where all true Britishers meet he was quite at liberty to do so, whether his audience liked it or not. The mistake he made was in striving to justify what he very well knew was a breach of gQod citizenship of the Empire, of which His Majesty is the head, and one of its hardest workers. An old saw says that disputes should not arise over matters of taste; but Mr. Scott Wfent out of his way to* raise a specious argument that “by unselfish working and by ungrudgingly giving services, not through talking ability,” was loyalty best shown. Moreover, he had consulted the dictionary and found that the welfare of the people was the supreme law of constitutionalism. Without consulting +he dictionary he could have ascertained that every country must have a head, just as every workers’ council must have its president. Apparently it did not strike his superior intelligence that the head of the great British Empire should at least be acknowledged and honored by virtue of his office as any president of the workers’ organisation. This is the mainspring of that supreme law to which Mr. Scott referred, the recognition of supreme authority, and all his “talking ability and unselfish working” cannot alter the fact that loyalty is not merely a sentiment, but a live force which all right-minded men in the Empire cherish to the utmost. Loyalty to the King means loyalty to the country, to its constitution and its institutions. It. is this loyalty that has made the British Empire what, it is to-day—the most beneficient empire the world has seen. This loyalty saved the Empire in the recent great, crisis, and thereby saved civilisation, and, incidentally, saved Mr. Scott from Teutonic thraldom. The flouting of loyalty, of course, accords with the tenets of the Alliance of Labor, but the great majority of our workers believe in the Empire, and the King as its head, and realise that the disloyal forces can only make for the disintegration of the Empire and the destruction of the high ideals for which it stands. Hence they wisely stand aloof from the Alliance.