LABOR HAS BUT ONE PASSION.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2962, 7 April 1919, Page 4

LABOR HAS BUT ONE PASSION.

“It is certain that in all classes —from the agricultural labourers to the more enlightened sections of the prosperous and professional classes—there is a general trend towards the Labour party, which has a programme, wants to change England and knows the kind of change it wants, and is free from that atmosphere of cynicism and corruption which during the war, although the politicians do not realise it, has disgusted a great many people with the older parties,” “Onyx” in the “New Statesman.” “Every ramp that is exposed, almost every political case that comet into the law courts, brings recruits to the Labour party.” “Labour in politics lias but one passion,” says the “New Statesman.” ‘‘lt is to make the world a better place for the people who inhabit it. More narrowly, it is to make this country a better place for the people who inhabit it. “This, it may be said, does not differ from the professed object of any other political party. If we examine the records •if the orthodox political parties, however, we shall find that they are more than philosophic in their acceptance of the present state o* society. They do not realise that this world of mean streets and mean ideals in which we live is no less intolerable as a permanent home for human beings than is the charnel-house world of the trenches. They do not grasp the fact that it is as necessary and as possible to release human beings from poverty as it is to release them from war. They are undoubtedly anxious to temper pcxerty to the shorn wage-earner. But they do rot wish to abolish poverty utterly. ‘They even have an idea that to wish to abolish poverty is a grossly materialistic aim. It is unquestionably materialistic in the sense in which it is materialistic to attempt to abolish famine or sleeping sickness or influenza or syphilis. But by a curious chance no politician e'er calls the heroes of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine materialists. Materialist is a name reserved for those who desire to abolish the disease of diseases—which is poverty. All human beings are, of course, materialists in a great proportion of their undertakings—-the farmer ploughing his field, the builder among his bricks, the cook in the kitchen. Civilisation could not exist unless we were willing to turn ourselves into materialists of this kind. “The materialism of Labour in politics differs from the materialism of the oldfashioned happy-go-lucky politics only in this—that Labour wishes to make use of the wealth produced by human hands and brains in order to purchase an equal chance of health, comfort, education, and adventure for every citizen of the State. The politicians of the past have been content to relieve poverty in so fan as the more luxurious classes felt they could afford to do so without sensibly interfering with their habits of life. Labour contends that we have got beyond a stage of social organisation in which men with a plurality of houses and a retinue of servants can be permitted to say that we cannot afford to rescue the children of the slums, and to feed, clothe, and educate them on the understanding that all men

are peers. “The war has taught us many great lessons in equality. It taught us that, if there was a shortage of beef and butter, the reasonable way to meet the shortage was not to allow the rich to compete against the poor for possession of the food supply, but that the State should step in and insist that every citizen, rich and poor, should be entitled to an equal share of these things, and that possession of money should not give any man a right to more than his fair share of the essential foods. Had we left the food question to ( be settled by competition, by the laws of supply and demand, and by the processes blessed by. Victorian economists, we should have seen all the beef and butter and margarine and sugar put by the profiteers at the disposal of the rich,, and it can hardly be doubted that a revolution would have broken' out. “The Government, by introducing the coupon system, and saying practically, ‘You shall have beef and margarine and sugar, not because you are rich, but because you are a fellow-citizen,’ took one of the greatest steps towards Socialism ever taken in the history of England. Every other consideration, it was realised, must, be postponed to the needs of national defence. . . They did establish the principle that a human being’s rights as regards the necessaries of life should be measured by his needs rather than by his banking account.

“Labour stands for the perpetuation and development of the equalities of wartime. It does not proclaim a class-war any more than Lord Rhondda proclaimed a class-war when he introduced the coupon system. It is moved by no ignoble jealousy of riches and comfort. All that it contends is that the nation can afford anything except a chronic plague of poverty, and that, if it were true (as certain reactionaries affirm) that there is_ not enough comfort to go round, then it would be the duty of the State to ration comfort as it has rationed sugar. For before the interests of any individual citizen come the interests of national defence. “In a nation at war national defence means defence against certain foreign enemies. In a nation at peace it means defence against those more permanlntly dangerous enemies—ignorance, poverty, and ill-health. The cost of defending the citizens in the mass from these three enemies should be a first charge on the national wealth. Many Englishmen expressed their willingness to spend their last shilling in order to defeat the Germans. Labour insists that we should also be ready to spend our last shilling in order to do away with poverty and ignor-

ance. “It will be the tell of the sincerity of the protestations made by the governing classes during the war whether they now accept the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity in their full implications, and are ready to make them the basis of a new social order. Men are no longer content with an equality which means merely an equal right to vote. “Equality in the popular imagination is slowly coming to mean an equal right, to send one’s son to the University, to send one’s children to the seaside for a month’s holiday, to live in a house of one’s own with a garden, to travel abroad, to go to the opera, to drink wine if one likes it, to wear comfortable boots —in other words, to be as cultured, as fully entitled to leisure, and even as luxurious as one’s neighbour. “Clearly, it is possible *to desire equality of this sort through simple greed. There is nothing essentially noble jn wanting to have a good time. There is, however, we think, something noble in wanting one’s children to have a good time and in wanting one’s fellow-country-men, most of whom one has never even seen, to have a good time. And Labour wants more than that. It wants men and women to have a good chance. “It sees that men and women are spiritually enchained by the material circumstances of poverty, and it suspects that the excessive mortality among the children of the poor is a mortality of soul and mind as well as of body. It admits that the idleness of the rich may be as spiritually degrading as the 'poverty of the industrious poor. But it does not propose the impossible task of establish-