JOURNALISM AND INDUSTRY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCVI, Issue 14310, 2 March 1907, Page 8

JOURNALISM AND INDUSTRY.

Newspaper proprietors are popularly supposed to know little about politics and less about journalism, but though politics were not in order at yesterday’s gathering in the Exhibition buildings the presence of the Acting-Premier served to emphasise the dependence of political movements upon the newspapers of the day. Mr Stead, it is true, claimed to have had some experience of journalism befox'© lie found more congenial occupation and, we hope, greater profit in the counting-house, and perhaps in his later career he sighs sometimes for a restoration of the rates of pay that ruled in It is journalistic days. We are afraid, however, that if those- rates had been continued it would be the newspaper proprietors and not the meat companies who would be facing a strike, and the observations of the Acting-Premier on the, situation would have had ah added piquancy. Mr Hall-Jones contrived, by tlx© way, to put the position very plainly in regard to the punishment of workers convicted of a breach of the law. Ho remarked that various Wellington employers had lately been fined for breaches of; awards, and that if they had failed to.pay the fines the terrors of the law would have been called down upon them so that at the lest they might even have languished in gaol. The obvious moral for the strikers was neatly emphasised by the Minister, who expressed the. pious hope that New Zealand would never see the day of one law for the rich and another for the poor.