AUSTRALIA AND COMPULSION.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 206, 29 August 1916, Page 9

AUSTRALIA AND COMPULSION.

(To the Editor.. Sir, —Your leading article in Saturday's issue on this most momentous 'issue will, I feel sure, commend itself to all true patriots, and, indeed, to all who are possessed of sufficient depth of intelligence and gratitude to enable them to realise and value the glorious freedom enjoyed by the masses under that grand and glorious emblem of liberty and Christian justice—the Union Jack. Unfortunately, however, there are in all communities disgruntled individuals of abnormal and peculiar proclivities, who, out of the sheer perversity of an ignoble nature, are "anti"-everything. I have just returned from sunny Australia, the land of my birth, and I dread to think of the chaos, the disorder, the fostering of a spirit of class-hatred _:hich would become intensified beyond all human ken but for the heroic and commendable efforts of the saner Trades Hall officials and the Workers' Educational Association, ably led by Professor Atkinson, of Sydney University, to counteract the insidious tactics and Satanic evils of a Mexieanised I.W.W. mob. Unfortunately under a Democracy majority votes are the deciding factor "in elevating to the rank of Parliamentarians men who, pf course, for very security's sake, must pander to the whims and clamour of the ignorant herd who have the strongest i voting strength. In mv opinion the only effectual remedy for the I.W.W. virus is the application of a dose of common sense on the part of our educated classes. What is wanted are strong educated men, sincere and idealistic, who will rule as an ignorant, degenerate, beer-bore, venereal-tainted mob deserves, but at the same time a spirit of mercy and a proper measure of social justice must be allowed the dispossessed, who, lacking real courage and brains, allow their passions and the rankling hatred within them to break out in evil directions at the behest of evil-designing agitators. Weaklings, physically or mentally diseased, or stunted, should not be permitted to propagate their species, and in particular drunkards and syphilitica "-hould be barred and scientifically dealt with, and then in a short time our Empire might truly ie classed in the forefront o* nations, a nation truly virile in mind and body. The "law of life," "biological law" if yon tike, mus t not be hampered; °_. all kinds of economic and false conventional artificialities, otherwise the I unnatural must lead to results unnatural and disastrous to the individual as well as to the nation. It is only in economic cesspools—socially speaking—that plausible LW.W. economists gain strength and influence. The Labour Government seems helpless to find a way out of the economic labyrinth. Poverty and its concomitant evils must be sincerely i tackled.—l am, etc., J. GOUGH, Iwenty years a Trades Unionist and Christian. Socialist.