Conservatives and Workers.

Hastings Standard, Issue 143, 12 October 1896, Page 3

Conservatives and Workers.

Oamakf MATT.. The debate on the Master and Apprentice Hill once more showed how little sympathy the Opposition have with the working classes, and that all their protestations of solicitude for the worker- are a shallow pr 'text. The ohje' t of the Hill is to ensure two things that lads going to any trade shall have a fair opportunity of becoming proiicent workmen, and that when they have completed their apprenticeship they shall have a reasonable prospect of obtaining employment at their trade as journeymen. These objects are to be attained by regulating the proportion of apprentices to journeymen and making the conditions of apprenticeship such that apprentices shall receive instruction. No reasonable person can dispute the wisdom of such an enactment. Where boys are out of all proportion to journeymen it is utterly impossible that they can acquire a thorough knowledge of their trade, and the result has been and continues to be, the turning out of a lot of indifferent and incompetent workmen Sir Robert Stout asked what was to become of the youth of the colony under the Bill. What, we ask in reply, is to become oi the men—the husbands and fathers—without the J'.ill? Are they, after spending years m learning a trade, to be hustled out of employment at it to make room for cheap boy labor, and driven to some other employment for which they are not fit-tefl and for which their earlier training in a great many cases disqualifies them ? Are their families to starve because employers, spurred thereto by an unhealthy and ruinous competition, demand child labor that is cheap? Are we to see men who ought to be at work under a sensible and reasonable industrial system, forced into idleness, while their children, who should still be at school, are driven to work to earn something to avert starvation in the family ? That is what is happening at this very moment, and Sir Robert Stout should recognise the fact and lend his aid to devise means for eradicating a serious evil. lint, blinded by political animosity, he declines to see the truth, and lends himself to the frustration of a sincere effort to raise the standard of industry in the colony. Let it at once In? clearly understood that the industrial classes reap no benefit from low prices, for low prices are only obtained by reason of lowwages, and low wages necessarily entails a restricted purchasing power. The few who labor not and the professional class whoso fees undergo no diminution with falling prices are the only people who profit by cheapened commodities. The whole tendency of low prices is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and to cripple industries by restricting the general purchasing power of the people. It is a well authenticated truth that that country is most prosperous where wages and prices rule high, and could our manhood be maintained in employment our industries would not need to rely upon cheap boy labor.