LABOUR UNREST.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 17 January 1912, Page 2

LABOUR UNREST.

Labour is in a state of ferment all the world over. On the Continent of Europe it is stretching for the extreme of anarchism, the policy which proclaims a state of war to be maintained until some good idea evolves itself. In England the pursuit is of a living wage with not much chance for the extremists. In Austraiia the disposition is to devise some improvement on the very excellent condition of existing things. In New Zealand it would be a clever man who could tell what is the matter with Labour. In Australia the disposition is of sound sense because most of the wild schemes offered to the Hobart Conference have been thrown out. In sober fact there is a Conservative air about the Hobart Labour Conference, which speaks volumes for the steadying effect on labour of the responsibility of government. In New Zealand, were the same sense present, Labour would remember the benefits of the long alliance between Liberalism and Labour. But Professor Mills, the mischief-making outsider, is "organising " complete forgetfulness of the leading fact of a beneficent history Labour to want to go alone on the road which the alliance made, not only more possible but ten times as profitable as any other. While Labour is away on this wild goose chase at the heels of a foreign ignoramus, from which it will return, we believe, with a sober majority ready to tar and feather all outside busybodies, the Dominion can reflect that the preliminary industries are the backbone of the land and that the basis of them is the closer settlement of the land. On that line the political evolution will be fought out not the line of the demand of city Labour.