THE AFFECTED SOCIALIST.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16493, 7 March 1914, Page 10

THE AFFECTED SOCIALIST.

Thb only value of such letters as the one from Mr E. J. Howard wo publish this morning is to show how unreasonable even the evolutionary Socialist can be. Mr Howard is a mild-mannered gentleman with the very best of intentions towards tho community at large; as incapable of adopting tho violent methods of the Syndicalists as he is of sympathising with the politics of the Tories, and yet he solemnly maintains that tho industrial world must remain in a state of chaos until the Socialists’ millennium arrives. His attitude, surely, is suggestive rather of anarchy than of Socialism. He says that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common, that profit sharing is robbery, “a greater menace to the general public than all the strikes that ever took place,” and that the only cure for the existing evils is the common ownership of the means of life. He cares nothing for co-opera-tion, or the single tax or prohibition or any of tho other palliatives that have been put forward by less impatient pooplo than himself. ‘‘Eacli of these,’’ he says, “is like poulticing a wooden leg.” 'lt seems that we are to have no improvement in any direction until we can have perfection. This is rejecting the half loaf with a vengeance and it looks very much like going without bread altogether. A curious kind of evolution 1 Of course the beginning of Mr Howard’s error is the assumption that the employing class and tho working class have nothing in common. Its completion is the insistence that they should have nothing in common. They at least are both interested in the means cf production and in the methods of production. To put tho matter on the very lowest ground, it pays the employing class to treat the working class well and so get the best service it can for its money. But we are not so much concerned by Mr Howard’s attitude towards this aspect of the question—which we suspect of being a little affected—as we are by his refusal to join in any forward movement that does not land him at his goal at the end of the day. If the workers all took up this position they could hope to make no further advance during the present century. They might as well sit down with folded hands and wait for a miracle to bring the millennium about.