Champion of Liberty
ECAUSE a virtue is only as large as the courage with which one practises it, it is an axiom, almost, that brave men do good despite themselves, John Wilkes espoused a cause beneath which he could line his own pockets. In the public mind he appeared the champion of liberty they kept returning to Parliament. Listening to the NZBS play The Demagogue, I wondered if the nobility of Wilkes’s cause almost made an honest man out of him. At least he seemed to be disturbed by his own lack of integrity, and that is not ignoble. On the whole I find myself tolerant towards men. of action and suspicious of contemplatives. When the Edward the Confessors are exonerated for their failure to rule on the score of retiring piety I wonder if they are really good or ~ (continued on next page)
whether they have simply retreated from the plane where gilt is more manifest. At any rate, I pursued the Wilkes of the play beyond his pleasant bounds there, to a footnote which tells us that he fought for the liberty of the press and at last gained permission for newspapers to report Parliamentary debates. Good as well as evil, then, is contagious.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 14
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206Champion of Liberty New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 14
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