A CORRECTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Stn,—Some months ago one of your correspondents, referring to the Labour Laws of New Zealand, remarked: "Let the con- stituencies ponder these things, and let it be further remembered that this blundering tyranny was enacted in New Zealand under the exercise of female suffrage." The Ashburton Guardian, of Ashburton, New Zealand, in commenting on this, says :— "Unfortunately for the writer's credit as a man of information these heroics of his are absolutely unwarranted by the facts. Woman suffrage in New Zealand came into force in September, 1893, and it was just two years earlier that the country's funda- mental Labour Laws came into existence."
And after sketching the causes which led to the adoption of the Labour Laws, he adds :—"Ail this had been consummated two full years before female suffrage became law in New Zealand. Hence the Spectator's correspondent, in trying to discredit the cause of woman suffrage in England by telling English Conservatives that female suffrage in New Zealand led to New Zealand's Labour legislation, is, a thousand times over, a hopelessly blind leader of the blind. To put it bluntly, he is the disseminator of an utterly groundless fiction, calculated to injure a cause which rests on social and economic justice, and the success of which, in England, is in nowise likely to be less beneficial than it has been in New Zealand."
I feel sure in justice you will insert this brief statement of the facts.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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