WHITE SLAVES OF TO-DAY.

North Otago Times, 1 November 1906, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHITE SLAVES OF TO-DAY.

In what docs the slavery. of our j times consist V What nro the forces that make somo people the slaves of others ? If we ask the workers, they will reply that they have been brought to it either because they had no land on which tlicv could live and work (that will be the reply of all the -Russian workmen, and of very many of the 1 English), or that taxes, direct and | indirect, were demanded of them' which they could only pay by selling their labour, or that they remained at factory work, ensnared by the more luxurious habits they have adopted, and which they can gratify only by selling their labour and their liberty. The first two conditions, the lack of land and taxes, drive man to compulsory labour, while the third, his increased and unsatisfied needs, decoy him to it and keep him at it. We can imagine that the land may be freed from the claims of private proprietors by Henry George's plan, nnd that, therefore, the first cause driving people into slavery, the lack of land, may be done away with. With references to taxes (besides the single tax plan) we limy imagine the abolition of taxes, or that they should be transferred from the poor to tho rich, as is being done now in' some countries, but under the present economic organisation one cannot even imagine a position of things under which more and more luxurious and often harmful, habits of life should not, little by little pass to those of the lower classes as inevitable as water sinks into dry ground, and that those habits should not become so necessary to the workers that, in order to be able to satisfy them they will be ready to sell their freedom. So that this third condition, though it is a voluntary one, and though science does not acknowledge it to be a cause of the miserable condition of the workers, is the firmest and most irremovable cause of slavery.

Workmen living near rich people al-; ways arc infected with new require- i molts, and only obtain moans to ! satisfy these requirements to the extent to which they devote their most intense labour to this satisfaction. | So that workmen in England or America, receiving sometimes ten times as much as is necessary for subsistence, continue to be just such slaves as they were before. These three causes, then, as the workmen themselves explain, produce the slavery in which they live, and the history of their enslavement and the facts oi their position confirm this explanation. All the workers are brought to their present state, and are kept in it by these three causes. These causes acting on people from different sides are such that none can escape from their enslavement.