RUSSIA'S WAYS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 109, 9 May 1923, Page 15

RUSSIA'S WAYS

NOT FOR AUSTRALIA

AN EXTREMIST CONVINCED.

(PROM ODR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

SYDNEY, 25th' April.

What Mr. H. G. Wells thought about Russia and'the tragic results of its social experiments in recent years fell upon deaf ears amongst the Eeds of the Sydney Trades Hall. Mr. Skeyhill, the popular Australian soldier-travelier-lec-turer, with his burning words of warning on his return from that ill-fated land, met with no more credulous hearers amongst those who saw everything through crimson spectacles. Even one.of Australia's Labour idols, Professor Meredith Atkinson, with his logical analysis of all that he saw, failed to impress extremists]' obstinacy. In the forefront of the implacable disbelief of all who dared to see anything but; wisdom, justice, and right is in Sovietism and its Rusisan exponents stood Mr. J. g. Garden, secretary of the Sydney Labour Council. Mr. Garden and his followers advocated Russian methods and Russian militancy, and every line published in the papers recounting the disastrous consequences amongst the unhappy Slavs they indiscriminatingly dubbed the propaganda of some vast capitalistic combination to hound the workers into slavery. They bred discontent with, all that unionism had won. It could be proved by economists that employees in industry reaped the bulk of its harvest; that if the total profits were distributed the wages already paid under the arbitration system would not be substantially swollen; it could be shown that a great proportion of the workers owned their own houses, had a degree of leisure never before enjoyed by workers anywhere, and had only to work contentedly and regularly to increase that prosperity. All was jeered and laughed at, and. Mr. Garden . and his followers called for Sovietism and nothing but Sovietism, and even established Sunday sohools to inculcate their doctrines of class war into tho child mind. Then Mr. Garden, the high priest of Communism, was chosen to represent Australian Labour at the Red Internationale at Moscow, and when he got there, he boasted that Communism had ruined Labour in Australia, and was "bossing" .the Labour movement. Since then Mr. Garden has seen much of Russia, and now he is back in Sydney, apparently a sadder and a wisar man, and his first words are a confession that Russian methods would not do for Australia, and that his views are much changed—that Labour's policy must ba less bellicose. What he has to tell of Russia, he fears, will shock his comrades. Mr. Oakes,. the Acting-Premier, in a pungent comment on this change of front, reminds Labour that what Mr. Garden now says is what nationalism has said all along.