CLERGY AND ECONOMIC PRODUCTION.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 239, 6 October 1916, Page 7

CLERGY AND ECONOMIC PRODUCTION.

tTo the Editor.) Sir —Mr F. G. Ewington's letter in the - Star " of 15th inst., on the resolution of the English Trades Council, regarding the clergy and military exemption, caps for some comment. He asks: Are the clergy unproductive workers'; and then proceeds to show that they are not. lie quotes Frederick List, who economically r-,-enerated Germany. I wai not aware fit any simile individual could economically regenerate any country. I have learnt that the economic development of a country is due to the efforts of those who are engaged in economic pursuits. Those pursuits will be the production and distribution of social wealth, otherwise called commodities. Technical and scientific education, plus physical effort, are the factors that produce social wealth, and none else. Before society was organised and developed industrially to the present stage of machine production, the methods and processes were more primitive and the individual with the hand tool produced the social and individual wealth of the day. Social wealth or commodities is produced by the application of labour to the raw material of the earth, and no other factors whatsoever enter into the process. Neither clerygmea nor musicians contribute one iota of assistance to the change from the raw material to the finished article. To prove this point I will take primitive production; such an example that there can be no contravention! The Esquimaux " have" neither clergy of the Church of England, Greek or Catholic, nor musicians, and yet before the white men came into contact with them (to their detriment) they transformed the raw material hides into clothing, sinews into ligatures for stitching their garments, and pieces of bone into spear-heads, etc.. and other instruments" useful to their means of life. Clergymen have their place in our State, of society, as they propagate the doctrines of an after life and a resignation tj the dispossessed, give religious consolation and thus assist in the maintenance of social order and the upkeep and maintenance of the social system, but to actual production of social wealth or commodities they contribute not one iota. The same applies to musicians; they cater to the aesthetic or recreative side of human nature, but not to actual production.—l am, etcH. HENDERSON. [We have cut down this letter consid erably, owing to lack of space.—Ed.] INDIAN LABOUR IN NEW ZEALAND.