INFLUENCE OF A NAME.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10025, 22 April 1910, Page 4

INFLUENCE OF A NAME.

Mr D. Knox, speaking in support of the Labour movement in South Sydney, stated that the party lost a good deal of support through the uncompromising baldness of its title. An intelligent interest in politics was quite foreign to some people; they liked to take their opinions ready-made, without the tfouble of drawing deductions from a conflicting mass of data. They had a tendency to follow the party with an attractive name.The term "Labor" savored to them only of the pick and shovel and the fustian coat, while that of "Reform" was like the echo of some great achievement., Such people enjoyed the delusive belief that they have a dignity to maintain, which even remote political association with anything approaching a suggestion of elemental toil would be derogatory, and as a salve, to pride embrace a cause—or want of causethat masquerades under a picturesque, but 6mpty title. Their attitude was analogous to that of a rpgiment of soldiers which, ordered on an expedition, refused to serve under the leadership of a general because his name was Black, and, therefore, suggestive of darkness and failure. They were generally antagonistic to unionism, perhaps, for fear of suffering, in the eyes of their friends, a diminution or loss of a purely imaginary dignity. There was a lack of consistency in their behaviour; but while they refused to recognise or support the principles'of unionism, they never failed to grasp the bene • fits it had conferred on members and members alike. Wo case was on record where an individual declaiming unionism had been so faithful to his Convictions to refuse the increaae of wages brought about by the direct influence of the unions. With such people political vices easily passed into Virtues, and paradoxes became axioms.