BUSINESS STAGNATION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLVII, Issue XLVII, 11 March 1912, Page 5

BUSINESS STAGNATION.

MORE WORKS CLOSING PEOPLE STARVING. {Received March 11, 8.5 a.m.) LONDON, March 10. There is increased stagnation in business. One hundred thousand notices terminated vesterday. Lord Ashton's mills have been closed until Thursday, affecting 60CO hand?. Many wcollen operatives at Colne Vsllev have been rendered idle and 20,000 Coine Valley and Huddersfield have been put on short time. - Tangve's at Birmingham will suspend oil Wednesday, affecting 3000 hands. Many of the poorest in South ales are on the verge of starvation. Including miners there are a quarter of a million unemployed in South Wales. Mr Will Crookes, M.P., at Taunton, sard that he saw the miners and owners before leaving London, and would not be.surprised if the strike was settled in another week.

THE SOUL OF THE MINER, Mr. Harold Begbi-e has been down to the Welsh mining districts, and, writing to the London "Daily Chronicle," he savs:—"l do not know how better to express this ferment at work in the storm centre of the mining world than to say that it is the sonl of the miner moving unwillingly from his ancient religiousness to a new and not yet wholly realised materialism which half frightens and half attracts his troubled and divided mind. Now, consider the thoughts of a miner who comes bv train or electric tram into Cardiff for a football match. Th e Welsh, miner of to-day has ont only received all the advantages of a wonderfully efficient educational system —far and away ahead of the English svstem —but he is by nature a thinking man, a reading man, a reflective and an imaginative man. He sees splendid and beautiful Cardiff, he observes th e prosperous and sometimes swaggering people in its flourishing streets, and he asks himself how this great change has been •brought about; he asks, himself where the money has come from to pay for al> this fine architecture, all these rich carriages and motor cars, all the happiness and prosperity of these happy, welldressed people. And he knows better any Socialist can tell him that but. for steam coal, but for the mine in the valley from which he has just come, Cardiff would b e still a small and sleepy town, little grander than his own village on the mountain-side. He begins to wonder whether he is getting quite a fair share of the plundered earth—he who takes his life-.in h:s hand time he goes down in the cage, who toils in a much-sweat for long hours underground, who returns to his crowded, tiny, and bathless cottage in a state so black and grimy that his wife can hardly welcome him. He wonders how it is that these fine people in Cardiff, who never descend into the mine, who live happily, safely, and cheerfully m the open air, can make so much more money out of Welsh coal than he, the skilled workman, who cnts and rips it from the bowels of the "arth. He thinks that there is something wrong. Now. while a vast (number o£ hard-working and thoughtful men feel that there is something fundamentally and pervasively wrong in the social order, civilisation is in peril. The miners may be utterly irrational in the present dispute; the masters' case, from an arbitrators of view, may be unanswerable ; nevertheless, if a million brave and skilled work.men brood over something which they feel is shameful and unfair, if endless conferences and conciliation meetings fail to lemove this dim, infinite, and deepburied sense of wrong, troube must be the end of things, peace is impossible.