"We" and "They"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 503, 11 February 1949, Page 5

"We" and "They"

N its comment on the findings of the Lynskey Tribunal, which made such a sensation recently in the United Kingdom, the Economist pointed out that interest in the proceedings was not due entirely to the vulgar greed for scandal but to the standing conflict between "we" (the people) and "they" (the machinery of government) and " ‘our’ inordinate satisfaction when one of ‘them’ was proved to be fallible." It was not a malicious remark, or even unkind, but it was a smack in the face for all of us. Though the Tribunal found a Minister guilty of accepting. indirect bribes, and a director of the Bank of. England guilty of some inclination to accept them, it established nothing worse than that, and entirely exonerated the members of the Civil Service. If any of that was sensational the reason was that it is sensational when corruption gets close enough to the British Government or the Bank of England to arouse even passing suspicions. It was the miserable satisfaction we, all have when administrators stumble that filled the newspapers and made the’ headlines, and it was that same human but discreditable weakness that made it’ worth while spending thousands of pounds in cabling the story as it unfolded to the ends of the democratic earth. We lapped it up in New Zealand because we are encouraged to be suspicious of all governments and can never succeed in rooting out a first-class scandal. Up to a point suspicion is wisdom: the eternal vigilance point. Beyond that it is folly or disease, and a standing menace to every democracy. The farmer who knows in -Edendale or Ngaruawahia that "they" are all crooked in- Wellington is in himself a harmless enough joke. The newspaper that aids and abets him to "knowledge" of that kind is not merely a poor newspaper but a creator of attitudes that (if its hand were ‘not from time to time uncovered), would make us a nation of political valetudinarians. :