"WORKING-CLASS LITERATURE"

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 62, 10 September 1921, Page 9

"WORKING-CLASS LITERATURE"

10 THI MITOB.

Sir,—We observe that those who want j to ace the .right established of-freely oiroulating literature which contains passages inoiting to theft/ violence, and crima raise the false ory that suppression of seditions matter, means a movement against "selling working-class literature." The Waterside Workers' Union at. its recent , "stop-work" meeting passed a motion: "That we protest against the gaoling of two of our members for selling working-olasß literature." This is simply humbug and cant. The persons who have been convicted and punished by our magistrates for sedition have been dealt with solely fc* breaking 'the law. To call literature which contains incitements to crime and violence "working-class literature" isa gross insult- to the workers of this Dominion. There may be a few mad heads who are so embittered against society as to consider that crime is not crime so long as they think it is j not. That this diseased, mental, and I moral outlook is the common standard of the workers in general, or. the waterside , workers in particular, we do not for a moment believe is the case. We have previously quoted from some of these Red publicationsl where the authors deliberately, directly, and enTphatically advocated theft and violence. Now, most certainly the workers of New Zealand are'not advocates of thievery, force, and violence. If they wrote and published their own literature it would not be of the anarchist type that is being imported into New Zealand, and sold in defiance of the law. But recently the annual conference of the "New Zealand Labour Party" made, a. public announcement that the party is against the methods of force and violence. What is the use of abstract declarations of that kind if, at the same time, it is being constantly taught that literature advocating force and violence should hare free circulation? If we are truly against violence, theft, and orime, then surely we must .be against the circulation of matter that incites to these wrong acts. The wprking-olass is not responsible for all the anarchist rant that is circulated in its name. Miss Hedwig Weittel, 8.A., asks us to believe that the magistrate convicted on false evidence, but we may expect nothing else from a person whose eduoation haß not carried beyond the prejudiced mental outlook of regarding our educational institutions as merely "useful tools for. oapitalistio sooiety." This correspondent quotes Abraham Lincoln as stating that the people of Amerioa held "their constitutional right of amending the Governments or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." Now, an educated person should remember that when it became, not a. question of overthrowing the Government, but an attempt to disrupt and overthrow the union, -named the United States,- then Abraham Lincoln stood four-square throughout all the storms for the Union. It is » sad thing to see unionists, watersiders, and others being used for pqr* poses of disruption under cover of«uoh specious gags a< "working-class literature," and other methods' of socialistic camouflage. " " • N.Z. WELFARE LEAGUE.