The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. THURSDAY. AUGUST 24, 1905 ON LABOR LEGISLATION.

Feilding Star, Volume XXVII, Issue 26, 24 August 1905, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. THURSDAY. AUGUST 24, 1905 ON LABOR LEGISLATION.

Has it ever occurred to tbe wage earners of New Zealand, asks the Press, to reflect how much the Seddon Government seems expressly devised to keep them down in their present position as wage earners, and to prevent them from rising higher in the social scale? That is emphatically the tendency of our labor legislation with its arbitrary rules as to a minimum wage, the rigid fixing of the hours of labor, and its general discouragement of the principle of any man, anxious to get on, working more strenuously than bis fellows, and so by and bye lifting himself into tbe ranks of employers of labor. That this is the effect of our laws ia testified to by the impression they made on the ablest and the most impartial ptudent of our labor condi j t ooswboever \isittd these shoren-. the I Commissioner sent by the American ; Government to report on our laws. 1 An American, he says, " while he finds much to admire in the interests and in many of the details of social legislation in tbe colony, senses a class consciousness among the peoplo, and a tendency towards rigidity and status in their institutions that does violence to his inherited ideals and sympathies. It is not in a dead level that the real prosperity of a nation consists. That was proved by the Incas of Peru. But it is in tho constant incentive to individual enter--1 prise, in untrammeled ambition, in the consciousness of the call to labor , on tbe part of every member of tbe community. The « strenuous life 'is already a well-worn term in our country, but it contains the secret of living for the present generation of Americans. We cannot but instinctively recoil from the thought of a State protectorate over our individual activities. Tbe nation is largely composed of people whose ancestors, or who themselves have devoted energy and sacrifice to getting away from that very thing. . . An American community would soon kick holes through all the Acts of Parliament of the other country." Of course they . would. A system under which i Andrew Carnegie would have been so tied and bound by the rules of Unionism and Arbitration Courts in his youth, that he probably would have remained the driver of a stationary engine all his life, is hardly likely to commend itself to the average American.