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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 1, No. 14 July 6, 1938

[introduction]

"Let's go and organise a League,
We can hire a University Professor;
A man like that won't cost us much, I guess, Sir!
Let's go and organise a League."

—"Adam Baba and he Forty Leagues."

Before me lies the extraordinary brochure issued by the Auckland Provincial Freedom Association.

On the cover is a delightful picture of a maiden—presumably Freedom—performing curythmies the crater of an active voleano; her arms are symmetrically upraised, and her mouth is split open in an idiotic grin; a sheet is wrapped inadequately round her lower quarters, and a bath towel wound round neck and arms; her torso and chest, hideously lopsided, are blatantly exposed, and resemble more than anything a physiologist's nightmare.

Underneath is printed the caption: "Government by the whole of the people for the benefit of whole of the people."

Can this be Freedom, we wonder?

And as we read the pages hat follow, we wonder more and more.

Of course, it was inevitable that the Book of Words should commence with a dissertation on the Baldwin Torch of Freedom. Who could resist the superb phraseology, the delicate imagery of this passage: "The fruits of the free spirit of man do not grow in the garden of tyranny... As long as we have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, men will turn faces towards, us and draw their breath more freely"?