POLITICAL ADDRESS.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 288, 14 May 1898, Page 3

POLITICAL ADDRESS.

■+ MR SCOBIE MACKENZIE IN AUCKLAND. Mr Scobie Mackenzie addressed a crowded meeting at the Choral Hali on Thursday night. His Worship the Mayor in the chair. The Hon gentleman spoke for two hours, and was attentively listened to throughout. THK LIBERAL PARTY. In reference to the Liberal party, he asked did it ever occur to them how extremely easy it was to become a Liberal ? What had they got to do ? They might take the meanest man that existed in the city of Auckland, he would come out to- • morrow, and how did he become a Liberal ? He said, "I am going to follow Mr Seddon "—(laughter)—and that was how it was done. If we could get the New Zealand Cross or the Victoria Cross on the same easy terms, would not we be a highly decorated people ? There was r.othinsj on the earth that they could do easier than become a Liberal. Follow Mr Seddon and they were accepted from that moment. He was going ;o appeal to their common sense and expose the ludicrousness of the whole thing, before he was done. (Applause). He would ask them was it not a fact that the Liberalism which had not root in the heart and the intellect of the man was a farce and & cloak for hypocrisy ? (Hear, hear). So that if a man did not show it in his acts, the professions of it could not be true. Now, if he appealed to his opponents and asked them could any man respect the great Liberal party so formed, would it not be absurd to tell him yes ? (Laughter) They could not do it to save their lives. When they saw Liberalism behind the scenes, that was the time that they saw the ludicrousness of it all, and all had had an opportunity given by Mr John Hutcheson, one of the Labour party. He had let us have a glimpse at the " make-up," as it were, of the great Liberal party. There was a great ele*? tion at Wellington, and in a speech Mr Hutcheson mentioned that Mr Seddon urged the Trades and Labour Council not to bother about running a Labour candidate, all they were to do was to see that their people got on the roll, and leave the rest to him. Then he went to the clubs. (Oh !) He (Mr Mackenzie) was not going to abuse anyone. Mr Kirk was a thoroughly respectable man, and a solicitor, and supported Atkinson's Government—up to the time that it went out. (Laughter). Had Mr Hutcheson failed, and Mr Kirk, Belected by Mr Seddon and the Trades and Labour Council (having nothing to do with it), wod, he would then have beeu a member of the great Liberal party—and a Labour member, too, would that solicitor have been. (Laughter). And that was the Liberal party behind the scenes. NEED TOR LIBERALISM. Would he tell them what the next Government—the Conservative Government as it was called—would have to do ? The first thing they would have to do would be to establish the elementary principles of Liberalism in New Zealand. (Applause). He would prove that. On the night of the Wellington election, Mr Seddon declared: "There were many persons who now said they were Duthieites, who on the previous night would not have dared to say bo " Well, the next Government would have to say to the people : " You have inherited the seeds of freedom in your blood, you belong to a nation that held aloft the torch of liberty, and that kept the spaik of it alive in the dark ages when the greatest of the Continental nations were sunk in darkness and degradation, you have scattered the seeds of free constitutions all over the world ; and you shall have a right—because it iayour birthright—to march up to the poll in the blaza of noonday and record your votes for any man you like, without fear or favour." Was that Liberalism or was it not ? Did Mr Seddon speak in haste or anger ? Was that the sort of sentence that, in haste or anger, would fall from the mouth of a man who was at heart a Liberal ? Mr Seddon's statement was in effect this : " You know the Government is going out, and vou arc very ready to declare yourself a Duthieite, but you would not have dared to do it last night before you knew that we were going out." That waspretty language to use to Englishmen. Well, the next Government would have to rectify that. They would have to tell the people that they were free to vote as they pleased, and that no evil would come nigh them for it. They would have to tell the civil servants that they could exercise their votes as they pleased without fear of injury to their {lositions. Let them look at the Weiington election. The Premier of the colony was there, and all the civil aer-

vauts who were called on to vote had to pass him or his relatives to get to tho booth. Would the Premier's presence there not influence those men whose lives almost depended on hia will ? Then the next Government would have to say something to the constituencies. They would have to tell the constituencies that they had beeu tampered with, bullied, intimidated, and had men thrust upon them in the past, but that in the future they would choose their own candidates without any interference. Why, what did our ancest r.s do when Governments interfered in the same way ? They passed a resolution in the House of Commons that it was highly criminal aud against the Constitution of the country for Ministers to interfere with elections at all. ADMINISTBATION OF JUSTICE. Then the next Government would have to address themselves to those who were administering justice in the colony, and say to them, " It is your duty to administer justice with stern impartiality, showing no favour to the rich," and tell them at the same time that if, through any action of those who are ahovc them, the judgment-seat is polluted, then a perfect cataclysm of woe may come over the country. Was there any need for telling the judges and the magistrates that? What about the "Tory Judge." A judge delivered a judgment against the will of the Government, and he was pronounced in public to be a Tory judge. A magistrate in the South—a first-rate man—gave judgment in the same way against the wishes of the Government, aud he was pronounced in public to be a fool of a magistrate. The other day the people were told, " Don't listen to a word the man says." A County Court judge, in the couise of the administration of justice, had to speak in sharp terms of a fraudulent bankrupt, and the man the judgs had thus spoken of was afterwards taken into the public service—by accident. (Laughter). Only last session, when the question whether Mr Ward could legally sit in the House came up, Mr Seddon said to the committee, " Never will I allow the affairs of Mr Ward to go before Judge So andSo "—refening to one of the most able, most eminent, most bloodlessly-impartial judges who ever dignified a Supreme Court bench. PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. One of the claims Mr Seddon made for Biipport was that his. Government, in quite an exclusive sense, was a progressive Government. He (Mr Mackenzie) wanted the people of Auckland to take a good look at their city ; he waDted them to use their imaginations and go back 52 years, to the time when the city of Auckland did not exist, When they had thought out all that, when they reflected that every provin • in the colony had a great capital city like Auckland, that they had telegraphs and telephones, and railways, that they had all the arts ot civilisation in such a comparatively short period since the colony was a deserted, barren, howling wilderness in hostile hands—when they remembered that, would they tell him that the era of progress in New Zealand commenced seven years ago with the advent of the present Government? In the future, when anyone told them that the era of progress did begin with the present Government, they might set them down as canting, hypocritical humbugs. Why, the present Government had been in office oae-eighth of cue time of the whole existence of the colony. Had they done during that time one-eighth of the progress ? They might reply to him : " Oh, that is material progress ; and the progress the pnscnt Government has made has been of an intangible and an indefioite kind, which consists in ideas." LABOUR LEGISLATION. Mr Mackenzie then pointed out that measures affecting labour had been introduced and passed by previous Governments. He referred especially to Bills introduced during the Atkinson Government in 1890, stating that it would be supposed that the men who now claimed credit for labour legislation would have supported those measures. Why, Mr Seddon, except two or three lines on the Truck Act, did not open his mouth about any one of those Bills, and seldom took the trouble to vote for them. When the Conciliation Bill was first introduced by a former Government, the then Opposition—the present Liberal party—opposed it because it was practically compulsory, the very thing that everyone now thought such a good feature ot the Conciliation Act. LAND SETTLEMENT. He did not want to detract from the men who were working now for land settlement ; but he wanted to point out that every Minister who went before them did his utmost for his own creditstrove with heart and mind and unceasing energy to get people upon the land. He quoted figures, proving that the number of settlers placed on the land was highest in 1893, next highest in 1894, and had dwindled down to 894 in 1897. The lesson to be learned from the figures he had quoted was : that there had been no organic change of any kind at all. Settlement had gone on just as it used to do of old—some years higher and some years lower. [Want of space prohibits our publishing more of the speech this morning. We will give Mr Mackenzie's remarks on several other important matters in next issue].