Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 252, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1911 — PROTEST OF HEW ZEALAND [ARTICLE]

PROTEST OF HEW ZEALAND

Land of Radical Legislation Objects Because Its Premier Has Accepted a Baronetcy. We have, as 8 nation, been inclined to look on the New Zealanders as a queer lot. -But at last, though we have hardly been able to understand their government of strongly socialistic tendencies, we are able to understand one protest they are raising. Joseph Ward is the premier of the country. When Dick Seddon was running a “pub” and working in the mines in the north Island, and HallJones was a carpenter, Joe Ward —if our memory does not fail us—was working as a telegraph operator somewhere around Christ church or Dunedin. Then came that revolution, which followed the great maritime strike almost twenty years ago, with the result that the old Tory party of land monopolists was thrown out bodily, and the butcher, baker and candlestick maker moved into the old rattletrap frame parliament building at Wellington to run the country. With plain, burly old Dick Seddon and old Scotch farmer John McKenzie at the head of the machinery, New Zealand started in on the most radical legislation that the world has seen for a long time. It was well suited to New Zealand and New Zealand was well suited to it and though there have been great failures at certain times and points, the sum total has -been good. In the meantime the character of the New Zealand people has changed. People who, when they were landless and homeless, were radical enough, are out-and-out Conservatives now and are ready to denounce any radical legislation that will affect their acres or holdings Likewise have the butcher, baker and candlestick maker changed. Dick Seddon died true to his start—a rough miner—but Ward soon blossomed out as Joseph Ward, and then, four years ago, he was knighted. Sir Joseph and Lady Ward did not, however, sit well with the New Zealanders. At the recent colonial conference Sir Joseph accepted a baronetcy. This was just beyond the limit for democratic New Zealand for noy? the title “Sir” became* hereditary. New Zealand has kicked out a hereditary land monopoly and now y it Is up In arms against a hereditary aristocracy. According to the dispatches Sir Joseph’s political sun Is sinking. New Zealand prefers to accept Gladstone and Seddon, who refused such honors, as her examples.