LABOR DISCONTENT.

Northern Advocate, 15 February 1912, Page 4

LABOR DISCONTENT.

MR LEO MYERS, President of the Auckland Chamber *of Commerce, Avants a Royal Commission set up to discover what is causing" the discontent arn°np; the working classes. Mr Myers needn't bother himself says tho "N.Z. Time?." Tlie facts are there for all the world to see. Labor's

grievance is that it is being exploited by the rent-lord and the middleman. The working man is paying too much for his bread because there is more or less a flour trust, and for his butteer because the black and white monopolists are holding huge areas in idleness to the exclusion of the useful people. L-abor doesn't want a Royal Commission to run its fingers through the ledgers of the middlemen. It will be content if measures can be devised by which the back of the boomster can be broken and the men v/ho do the work shall get a fair share of the profits. People are no longer interested in the freehold catch-cry and the leasehold counter-yell. They v.-ant Parliament to deliver the goods. Thousands of farmers' sons want to make butter. They cannot do so because there are some people in New Zealand who cannot exist on less than eighty thousand acres of land. Therefore they come to town and help to sell collars. The working classes (i.e., all of us) do not want palliatives. The aim of Governments (without promptings from Royal Commissions) should be to encourage proficiency and efficiency in all walks of life, and to see that working men's sons are so educated and equipped that they may be prepared to accept responsibility M'hon it arrives. The standard of efficiency in all walks of life in this country to-day is deplorably low, and the working man is concerning himself fnr too much about shortening his hours and increasing his pay and far too little about doing the job well and giving value for the wages he draws. Our educationists are concerning themselves about, manufacturing lawyers, doctors, and experts mere than they are about putting reliable artisans on to the market. The agitator is an ignoramus talking to ignoramuses. His appeal is to class prejudices and not to class pride. He does not yet realise that class prejudice is useless, and that class pride can only be legitimate when it is based on the power to achieve. The syndicalist wants to take a hammer and smash things up, to tear up agreements and raise gehenna, but he has not half a notion what he is going to do for the working classes when he has broken all the eggs in the basket. Antagonism between "master" and "man" is not on the increase. In such cases as it exhibits itself it is fathered by ignorance and mothered by prejudice >n both sides. As long a: ; the world lasts there will be '•masters" and "men." What this country wants is more and more efficiency in both and less and less talk from either. A Royal Commission might fill a very expensive blue book with evidence and theories, and give us a very much less sound verdict than that.