Bible in Schools.

Incidentally I have now dealt with plank No. 6, and even touched on plank No 5, viz., the Bible-in-scliools question. For, if the Referendum is such a life and death matter on general grounds, we are predisposed to favour its application, other things equal, to a specific problem that is in any case troublesome, if only to accustom the people to political habits of thought that we deem essential to their salvation. Besides, unless our secularist friends are afraid that the decision of the people will be in favour of Scripture teaching, why do they so bitterly oppose the referendum in connection with the Bible-in-scliools? My dear friend, Mr John Gammell, has been writing to the Wellington newspapers and deprecating the popular reference as bowing to what he calls the "decision of uneducated servant-girls," and as flouting the majesty of that "Palladium of our liberties"—Parliament! Oh, if only Mr Gammell, instead of spending his time in New Zealand, where the House, whatever its faults, has as yet been truly the servant of the people, had been able to witness what has been well called the "breakdown of Parliaments" in some of the older countries, to say nothing of the unblushing purchase and sale of legislation in America! He would then have less trust in mere "representative" government as a "Palladium of liberties"—less awe in the presence of the mere "representative" chamber which is in other countries sometimes so sadly mis-representative. Danger there might be, I can conceive, in mere direct government by the people, without any representative assembly at all; though where it has been tried, as in the Forest Cantons of Switzerland, it has been ideally successful. But what "Palladium" can be imagined more safe, more inviolable, than a Parliament, checked by occasional direct exercise of sovereignty on the part of Parliament's masters? Representative government, with the Popular Initiative and Veto as Sovereign in the background—that is a combination which we may indeed call a Palladium of human liberties!