The Dominion. MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1907. LABOUR IN CONFERENCE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 81, 30 December 1907, Page 6

The Dominion. MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1907. LABOUR IN CONFERENCE.

It- is, perhaps, early to judge the work of thi} annual conference of the Independent Labour League. • But so far as it has gone, it holds out little promise of real usefulness in contributing anything practical to the discussion of our political problems. "Possibly the League would retort that it is not its business to assist the general public and the politicians in the capacity of a disinterested body of scientific political inquiry, any more than it is the 'business of Sinn Fein to educate the British public in the real problems of Irish Government. At the same iiime'the general body of workers would be better served if the. conference were something other than the Council of War that it really is and that its organisers would doubtless admit it to be. Organised Labour, however, has omitted to make it quite clear who the enemy or enemies may be. ./Upon this point Labour/leaders, are themselves uncertain, and it is their uncertainty which accounts for their'rather confused hostility to the President of the Arbitration Court and to the established order of things in general. Indeed, to anyone who mixes with the workman, skilled or unskilled, and knows his practical hard-headed com-mon-sense, it is difficult to understand how it is that he permits himself to be misrepresented by men who waste so much of their time and energy in wild and extravagant denunciation of things in general, and offer- so little in the way of practical suggestions for the benefit of those ' whose : interests should be their first consideration. It is true that at the Conference now proceeding a committee has been appointed to draw up a fighting platform consisting of " the reforms which the League has reasonable hopes of carrying into effect during nest Parliament!" but the tone of the Conference's deliberations rather indicates that a good deal of what seems " reasonable" to Labour leaders is likely to be regar.ded as unreasonable by ordinary men. In the meantime we may call attention to some of the interesting resolutions carried by the Conference on Saturday. / The first resolution calling for notice is that in which the League affirmed the " urgent necessity for an Act to empower the Arbitration Court to fix rents, interest and profits, and to regulate the prices of commodities, otherwise the regulation of wages will be a farce." No reasonable person can say that there is anything really illogical in this demand. If the Arbitration Act had remained what it was originally intended to be, namely, a tribunal for occasional use as a preventive of serious strikes, the case would be different. But the Act, as might havo been foretold, has become a wage-lix-.inx machine in constant conflict with

the natural law of supply and demand. J-hat law, when interfered with through, an artificial fixing of wages, asserts itself through a rise in prices, and the desire of the League to attack the problem of rents, interest, profits, and prices is quite a fitting sequel from tite League's point of view. To many people, liowever, it will, probably occur that, if the resolution of the League were given effect to in an Act, industry would be paralysed. The law of supply and demand would assert itself through the disappearance of Capital, of which Labour forgets the extreme mobility, and the resultant ruin of the country. The resolution of the League is, therefore, a striking piece of evidence in support of our frsquent contention that, when a Government tampers with individual liberty and natural law, it sets in train a course of development which was never intended. Similarly, the resolution affirming the necessity for an immediate extension of the functions of the State for supplying people with the necessaries of life is Labour's logical demand that the Government shall be true to the principle that it. laid down when it inaugurated the State coal depots, and that it has carried to the length of nationalising the trade in oysters. Most interesting of the Conference's resolutions is that which " affirms the principle of the right to work," and lays it, down " that it should be the duty of those in authority to provide work for every citizen who applies for it." Out of its context, this delightful declaration would pass as the invention of 1 a humourist bent on satirising the wonderful things that Labour conferences think of. It is, indeed, a subject for chuckles rather than for ser-, ious criticism, and it deserves to take rank with the decree of the ' fabled Eastern potentate that poverty should cease forthwith. The executive of the Conference is to be instructed " to prepare a scheme whereby the principle of the right to work could be made operative." We shall look forward with interest to the Executive's report, for it is not to be expected that the Executive will be at a loss to devise a scheme for this or any other purpose. There is something fascinating in the idea of a society in which wages shall be raised to the highest patch, and the cost of living reduced to an infinitesimal figure, while everybody will be supplied with plenty of'work. The Executive, we presume, will confine itself to the simple problem of finding out who shall pay, the wages when there is nothing to pay them with. If the worst comes to the worst, we suppose, we shall all live comfortably on what we owe each other. ,