Our Civil Liberties

How stands our democracy? A referendum, we thought, was the purest and most direct form of democracy. Mr. Fraser, after a little pressure from Mr. Holland, stated that everybody who wanted to be heard on the question of conscription would be allowed to speak. Yet what is the result? Reports of meetings held by anti-conscriptionists all over the country have clearly shown that our police force has acted directly contrary to Mr. Fraser's public statement on free speech. Meetings have been consciously and purposely mobbed and disrupted without the police intervening to see the rights of the speakers upheld. Meetings have been allowed to degenerate to a point where speakers have had to be taken into protective custody.

In Nelson police stood by while one man was injured and dispatched to hospital, another debagged and a third doused in a public convenience. What price civil liberties?

In Wellington the home of three elderly women was besieged at 4.30 a.m. Sunday morning by police wanting to know if they belonged to an anti-conscriptionist movement, and threatening arrest.

A student of this college was intimidated and threatened with personal violence by his local policeman if he did not cease anti-conscriptionist activities.

We feel that it is impossible to reconcile these facts with the ideal of a free democratic referendum. The elementary civil liberties of free speech and of the right to act by your conscience are being suppressed in a campaign which pretends to provide a means whereby those very liberties will be protected from some mythical foreign foe. It would be more to the point, Mr. Fraser, if first we achieved this democracy you talk of, and then proceeded to defend it.

P. F. J.