After the Strike.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18725, 23 June 1926, Page 10

After the Strike.

Beading the English papers that somehow managed to appear dUripg, and immediately after, the General Strike is like listening for the first time to long-distance wireless. You do not get all, or nearly all, of what you know ia being said or sung or played on the. other side, but it is exciting to know that you are getting a real word now and again. Occasionally, too, we make a discovery—for. example, that it was not only the strikers who interfered with the liberty of the Press. In order to bring out the Gazette the Government Seized a considerable portion of the paper supplies of "The "Times," to the great annoyance not only of "The Times" itself, but Of large numbers of educated men and women all over the Kingdom, who realised that it was almost as dangerous to have the State interfering with the liberty of action of independent newspapers as to have their offices closed by Bolsheviks. Another fact that has not been fully understood in New Zealand .is that the calling-off Of the General Strike not onlj surprised the miners but enraged them, and may yet have the effect of disrupting the whole Labour movement. But the most interesting fact of all, though it sounds a little odd at first to say so, is still the meaning of the Strike and the blind, stupid, and more or less ignorant way in which it began. Thus in " The " Times" of May 11th, when the General Strike bad already lasted for ten days, a letter appeared from Lord Hugh Cecil "summarising a few "points which seem not-always kept "in mind," the most important being the folly of calling the General Strike industrial. "If a man," Lord Hugh found it necessary to explain, "in the "course of discussion with another "pulls out a revolver, the revolver is "not an. argument but a deadly " weapon* • The wars of the 16th and "17th centuries arose but of religious "disagreements; but they were not " theological controversies—they were wars." And if it is remarkable that readers of «The Tunes" should still have to be told what the Strike meant, it is even more remarkable that a big group of " men. of Cambridge" had to write to Mr Baldwin (another Cam-

bridge man) repudiating an appeal foiintervention issued over the signatures of a number of Fellows of Cambridge Colleges. The ' last group recognised " the danger to constitutional govern- " ment involved in the recourse to a " General Strike," and the " right and " duty of citizens to co-operate in the " maintenance of order and vital ser- " vices"; but because they felt convinced that the Strike was not revolutionary in aim they thought that Mr Baldwin could, and should, withdraw his demand for an unconditional surrender. The other group, including some of the best known figures at the University—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Sir Humphry Rolleston, Professor Wood, Sir Frederick Hopkins, Sir Henry Howard, and nearly two hundred others —wrote to The Times " to say that the memorial to Mr Baldwin was . " superfluous if not mis- " chievous," that considerable confusion existed in the minds of wellmeaning persons " between the events "and policies which precipitated the " General Strike and the significance " of the latter action for the Common- " wealth," and that although " the "maintenance and comfort of minori- " ties should be the care of a Govern"ment up to the point where further " special consideration jeopardises the "well-being of the nation as a whole . an attempt to alter govern- " ment policy by any other means than " argument or the suffrage is revolution, no matter what may be the " nature of the force employed." Though the cost of the Strike wa3 out of all imaginable proportion to its lessons, it was not quite a dead loss if the truths so clearly enunoiated in this Cambridge pronouncement have penetrated the national mind.