The Grey River Argus TUESDAY, June 16th, 1936. MEN OR MACHINES ?

Grey River Argus, 16 June 1936, Page 4

The Grey River Argus TUESDAY, June 16th, 1936. MEN OR MACHINES ?

It is a commonplace fact that to-day as never before the mind of civilised humanity is focussed on the social question. This is another way of saying that it is the system of industrialism which is in question. A spokesman of our own employers at Geneva, lias proclaimed his condemnation of the shorter working week for the Dominion even before it has been given a' trial. The Prime Minister rightly points to the inevitable shortening of hours through the enormous reduction in the amount of human labour employable in industry that has been wrought by machinery. But employers are prone to close their eyes to this vast displacement of labour, and won. der why they cannot also close the eyes of the great majority, the workers who are idled, or 1 are turned into automatons. The fact of the matter is that cmployerdom is living in a fool’s paradise It ignores the obvious. There has just passed in England, a writci* who spent himself in the endeavour to bring home 1o industrial capitalists their shortsightedness. H e was Gilbert K. Chesterton, a champion of the hverage man, or, as he once put it. the everlasting man, whose history records the rise and fall of so many industrial systems, but none so enslaving as th e present one. Noted as a paradoxical commentator, he stood for a restoration of ihe lost dignity of the poor and the toiler. Not a. capitalistic, but a proletarian society, was his description of the system of modern industrialism. The (characteristic people of the system, he said, are not the few who draw the profits of industry, but the many who earn them. In his biographical works on Dickens, on Cobbett, and on the founder of a mendicant order, Francis of Assisi, it was the inherent rights and dignity of men that Chesterton strove to illustrate, and also the way in which these are submerged by an economic system which lowers men to the level of machinery; divorces them from even the desire for property of their own; and drives them to the desperate conclusion that any such responsibility or liberty. as inheres in individual possession can only b e delegated to somebody in a representative capacity. The whole history of the depopulation of the British countryside at the behest of monopolists who made men but food for machinery was ever before Chesterton as he sought to undo this evil. He recalled the times when workdays were scarcely more numerous than holidays in his native country, and held up the ideal of a restoration of individual liberty in the economic no less than in Ihe political sphere. He denied strenuously that the option of occasionally striking off a name upon a ballot paper is the sign manual of equality or freedom, when nine-tenths of the populace are <wage slaves, with the main quest of their existence merely

one to find a boss. Huge emporiums, chain stores, anonymous monopolies of factories, land, or public utilities were quoted by him as enterprises which the masses might organise to end. The question he put to tlio'se who talk of the unfit when dealing with the proletariat is one many so-called social reformers yet must answer. It is as to whether they want to breed simply a race of mon and women suitable for capitalistic industrialism. Do they wish only a docile majority capable of subsisting on a minimum of everything, whether food, raiment, education, leisure, or amusement? This question is coming up to-day in New

Zealand, where so many employers insist any production increase machinery gives shall go. entirely for the advantage of the machine owner, with the least possible betterment of hours, conditions, and pay for the operatives. As Mr Savage suggests, the Government can go next into the question of finding for workers adequate opportunity to utilise 1o advantage such leisure as they will obtain from the introduction of the forty-hour week. Incidentally, it is possible that better methods of employing leisure may be found by workers than those used by others with greater leisure than. the forty-hour week is calculated to confer upon wage-earners. The alternative to distributing employment and the products of. labour more widely and fairly in the community is no doubt what Mr Forbes yesterday called economy, which the people turn ed down at last election. Jt has been tried and found wanting not only in this but in many another country. It is therefore ceitain that, however stubborn the attitude they may profess at Geneva, industrial capitalists must recognise the inevitable. 3hat is. the necessity more evenly and universally to divide all of the savings in time and the gains in wealth that are due to the progress of invention and the advancements of mechanical art and development