I.

The fundamental characteristic of Liberalism is that it seeks to embody certain great principles in legislation, or that it seeks to bring legislation into accordance with certain great principles. These principles are of two somewhat distinct kinds, and we may designate them the moral and the scientific. The moral principles are justice, benevolence, wisdom, and the like. The scientific are those facts and truths, political, and economic, and social, bearing on the welfare and improvement of society, which philosophers and scientists have made known. We refer to such scientific truths as the great truth now coming into universal acceptance, that society is an organism, an organised growth continually changing or evolving into something different, and capable of being indefinitely improved or deteriorated. Whatever we seek to enact into a law, or to build up into an institution, ought to be in agreement with the principles of moral and social science. Only those laws and institutions which embody and carry out such principles are permanently beneficial to mankind in the every day circumstances resulting from the growth or evolution of society. Our circumstances are continually changing, and our laws and institutions must be changed accordingly and made suitable. Thence, to base our laws and institutions on the principles we have been mentioning, and to maintain them in harmony with the best sentiments and aspirations of the age, expresses the duty, as it forms the ideal, of the truly Liberal statesman.

Let us now ask, in all seriousness, whether the Liberalism, whose fundamental characteristic we have described, be the kind of Liberalism which for years past has been ruling New Zealand. Is their voluminous legislation in accordance with justice, benevolence and wisdom, or does it embody and carry out the scientific knowledge of the age? Certainly not. We doubt if our present Ministers ever thought of, or could even understand, statesmanship so high and enlightened, and so alien to the spirit of their policy, as that just now spoken of.