Strikes and Christmas.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18570, 21 December 1925, Page 10

Strikes and Christmas.

The appeal of Mr Havelock Wilson for a Christmas fund for the three thousand women and children who are hungry and without clothes in British ports ought to make Mr Tom Walsh wish that he were still in gaol. It ought to make every seaman in the Empire ask himself how much longer he,is going to be the chopping-block of revolutionary agitators. There is no reason to doubt Mr Wilson's statement, that 75 per cent, of the strikers left their ships through intimidation, and if there were, the only fact we would question would be his percentage. Everybody knows that a majority of men in three strikes out Of four cease work because they are afraid to carry on, and that their women and children pay for their folly and, weakness. Yet it is not at all likely that Mr Walsh will feel any emotion but rage at Mr Wilson for holding him up to public examination. Even if Mr Wilson were not his enemy, Mr Walsh would be no more likely to learn from him than the men of the Manuka showed themselves to be last week. The millennium has not arrived yet, morally or economically, and until it is a few ages nearer we shall waste our time if we expect men to turn from strikes because they are wrong. Even Mr Wilson does not ask> Mr Walsh to send conscience money: he asks him to send peace money, which is a very different thing, and to send it mainly for his own sake. We, waste time asking Labour to be moral, and we do very little better when we ask it to be fair, but there ought to be some sense in asking it to consult its own economic interests a little more frequently. The Manuka's men, for example, probably intend to spend Christmas in Melbourne, and if it were the custom for ships to beat for the nearest port before Christmas and stay there it would not be a very grievous offence to try to arrange for Christmas at home- But the shipping world does not come to a stop for Christmas, and cannot stop, and seamen know perfectly well that it. cannot before they sign on. They enter into a contract to keep the ships going, understanding quite clearly that transport is one of those occupations in ythkh the convenience of the

majority must rule; and they understand also that the more time they waste the less money everybody will have, including their own wives and children, to spend on Christmas cheer. That is.to say, they onght to be prepared to make the elementary sacrifices which other men make cheerfully if the rewards are coming to their own households. And that is only half the story. The other half is that men who devote " 60 per cent of their time to doing their "work and 40 per cent, to doing "the boss" make the world 40 per cent, less happy on Christmas Day than it might be. We all want to be happy, and few of us in clutching'at our pleasures worry much about the pleasures of others. But it •is so obviously absurd to expect to pull plums out of the Christmas cake which we are not prepared to put in that the conduct of the Manuka's men last week was as stupid as it was unscrupulous. In America wage-earners and capitalists avoid strikes, and grow rich together, and until seamen drop the notion here that they can have merry Christmases and strikes too no one will have the Christmas that he is entitled to. *"