ARMS OF SOCIALISM.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1038, 30 January 1911, Page 8

ARMS OF SOCIALISM.

THE TOOLS OF PRODUCTION. . Ail address was delivered in His Majesty's Theatre last evening by Mr. ; Peter Bowling on "Tho Materialist Con-: ception of History." vMr. W. Taylor oc- \ cupied the chair. t _ ! In his address Mr. Bowling laid him-; .self out to prove that the whole changc 1 in the' methods of life and society from the earliest times was due to the change in the. tools of production. He traced this from the primitive man (the age when prisoners and slaves were eaten by cause of the conditions and environment demanding it) to the present time, when bv reason of the development in and the perfection of tools, such "slaves" were, in a moral sense, "eaten" in another way. He dwelt upon the "slave" period in the. world's history, when the prisoner, or the inferior, was dealt with differently—viz., as a slave—because he was required for a different u c o owing to the difference in the tools,of production. Incidentally, lie said that; the abolition of slavery in North America was due to want of labour, created by the perfection in machinery—a free .labourer—and not because of the promptings of humanitarian feelings.. Again, he said that it was not the titled cla-?s in England who held tho destinies of .the. nation. It was the great industrial class, the class they called "capitalistic." Slavery, he again said, became immoral in England when, owing to the perfection of the tools of production, it became . unnecessary. . It was then that the churches went against it, and. prpached against it. To-day, when the Socialist said that there shouid be a state of society in which everyone should • have a- certain equal time for. work and equal time for all for leisure, they were told it was wicked, impossible, and immoral. It was no longer necessary to enslavo man, because they had employed' tho forces of - Nature to do the labour., He theu spoke strongly of the dependence of, the wage-eavning- cla«s upon , tlio capitalistic class to-day. • He. also instanced the Arbitration Court as a futile means for helping the workers to. attain their aims. Ho frequently as- . serted that all the big corporationsbanking and commercial—were all combined for their own capitalistic, interests, nii'd were hostile to the labourers,. Ho urged education in regard to the economic question, and advised workers that, once knowing their real interests,, they should go straight ahead, without back-stepping or. side-stepping, till they reached their goal: