THE SINS OF THE PRESENT MINISTRY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 8784, 26 January 1892, Page 3

THE SINS OF THE PRESENT MINISTRY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I have to thank you-very sincerely for inserting my letter on the 18th instant. Considering how strongly it opposes the views advocated in your leading columns, its insertion' is an act of courtesy and courage "•'uch few newspapers would have ventured on. Allow mo to correct two errors. In the Latin quotation, Solitiidinem faclunt, pacem appellant, the last word was spelt appellunt. The word " except" was printed instead of "access" in the sentence " so as to block out all access to the back country." In a parallel column with my letter you have printed one from a Mr. Charles Hardy, of Dairy Flat, in which he appeals in vehement language to the small freeholders. He says: "1 am astonished to see the •suicidal apathy in which the settlers are •'link "If the small landowners desire to save their homesteads from the ■;rasp of the tyrannous, from the power of the unscrupulous, from the hands of political and needy adventurers, let them arouse from their lethargy, and let them form their anks whilst they are still able, or soon they will be overpowered.. Their lands will be taken by the friends of disorder, anarchy, and ruin, and themselves will be fortunate if from the rank of freeholders they are allowed the status of tenants of the State, or, in other words, tribute-payers to the idle, the dissolute, and the vicious." Now, I am a small— very small— owner, and so is my wife. Yet I am still ••'link in "suicidal apathy,"after reading Mr. Hardy's tremendous appeal. I -wish I could write as forcibly as Mr. Hardy, but it is not one of my gifts. And yet he has not roused me. I am not afraid of my small freehold (which is not mortgaged, by the way,) being torn from me by the "grasp of the tyranous," etc., etc., etc. Nec me ista terrent. No; what frightens me, what is bringing my few grey hairs with sorrow to the _ grave, is something else. I will confide it to your sympathising bosom, Mr. Editor, in the full confidence that you will not print this part of my letter. My wife's section adjoins mine, and the haunting fear that is shortening my life, is lest she should call upon ma to fence! What should I do in such a case ? I should be obliged to pay for my own half of the fence, and her's too ! I am far more afraid of this than of any of the Ministerial schemes. I. know that they will not touch the small freeholders, ' because Ministers want most of all to en- | courage settlement on the land, and it would be mere midsummer madness to attack the rights and interests of the small settlers. Land nationalisation is 110 part of practical politics at the present time, and certainly will not be in New Zealand for a century to come. And, now, as to another branch of the Ministerial policythe Labour Bills. Of course, to some extent, the late Government is as responsible as the present one for the Labour Bills. But I think we should be doing them 110 injustice by assuming that, although they laid them before Parliament, they had no wish that they should pass. The present Government are unquestionably in earnest in this matter. My own opinion, based on a careful perusal of them, and an intimate knowledge of the wage - earning classes, such as very few persons except those in my profession can acquire, is that they ought to be passed just as they are sent up from the organised representatives of the trades' unions. I do not. consider all their provisions wise or judicious. It is very probable that a little experience of them in operation will show that in some points they will be detrimental to the interests of the wage-earners themselves ; but still I think they ought to be passed. For centuries the wage-earners have been treated like childrenlegislated for, and mostly against; never allowed to manage their own affairs, and constantly told that they did not know what was best for their own interests. To a certain extent, when hardly a tenth part of them could read and write, this might be true. But it certainly was not true that the best judges of what was good for them were their employers. I can remember the days when child labour, and women's labour, were unrestricted as to time or age; when machinery was unfenced, and the most frightful .accidents daily took place ; when boys and girls, young men and young women, worked together half-naked in the coalpits of my native county; when trades' unions were illegal combinations, and an organised strike punishable as a conspiracy. All these things have been changed, but changed in the teeth of the most strenuous opposition from the employer class. The ruin of the manufacturing industries was prophesied by Messrs. Bright and Cobden when Lord Ashley proposed his Ten Hoift's Bill for women and children, and every other attempt to free the wage-earning class from the disabilities under which they suffered was met in a similar way. Now that they have obtained a fair share of political power, now that they are educated, they want to legislate for themselves. Is this unreasonable? Do we not all, as Britons, pride ourselves on the fact that we make the laws to which we have to submit ? But you will say that they will make : mistakes—that they will injure trade and commerce. . Very well, suppose they do. . Has not the legislation of the educated classes contained many mistakes? Within my own memory Great Britain was a country strictly protective : it is now entirely freetrade. One or the other of these systems must have injured trade and commerce most seriously, and yet both were the products of Legislatures in which the wage-earning class had no votes, and hardly any influence. Is not our legislation largely made up of " Acts to repeal an Act" or to " amend an Act?" Is there any attempt at finality in it 'i If the Labour Bills prove , », i

as working Acts, to be injurious to legitimate. trade and commerce, the very first to feel it, and to suffer from it, will * be the wageearners themselves, and you may depend upon it they will have them altered or repealed in double-quick time. But of one thing no one who knows the working classes can have any doubt, and that is, that it is their fixed determination to tolerate no trades or manufactures that cannot and do not give a fair remuneration to the workers in them. They will have no sweating trades, no trades in which a capitalist makes a profit out of the toil, the health, and the lives of underpaid and overworked employes. And I think that they are quite right. I say—Perish the trade that can only be carried on by half-starved men and women and children, working themselves to death for a miserable wage, which allows them neither the comforts, the decencies, nor even the necessaries of life. If in this new country we cannot give our workers all the comforts of a decent civilised life, and the means of laying up something for sickness and old age, then the sooner New Zealand is annexed and governed by people with a medium allowance of brains, the better. The great mistake made by the capitalist class and their advocates in the Press is in assuming that the workingman (I use the conventional term in the conventional sense for convenience only) is as selfish as the capitalist. _ Now, that is a great mistake. He has a higher standard of individual and corporate honour; he is willing to make far greater sacrifices for the sake of his fellowworkmen. He wishes to raise, not himself individually, but his whole class, and for this he is willing to make sacrifices that, in proportion to his means, are enormous. Hence in the long run he wins. The profits on capital invested in industrial enterprises are getting smaller and smaller ; far more dependent on individual energy and push, on advertising, etc., than they used to be. I can remember the time when great manufacturing firms would have scorned to advertise their goods, and when the whole of the manufacturers, with one or two exceptions, had sprung from the ranks of the wageearners, within two generations at the outside. There are families now who have allied themselves with the titled aristocracy, and who figure amongst the aristocracy themselves, whose grandfathers or great grandfathers had been working men, who could not speak a sentence of any language but English, and that with a marked provincial dialect. These fortunes were made during the time of the great war with France, under a protective system. Nothing of the kind is possible now. The colossal profits of those days cannot be made. The consequence is that the rigid line of demarcation between employers and employed cannot be passed over, and a bitter feeling of jealousy prevails between persons whose interests ought to be one. In these new countries, manufacturers do not prosper because the workman insists 011 a higher wage than the same work gets in England, and will not work unless he gets it. There is not the slightest doubt that, individually, the workman would have more constant employment, and be better off, if he were to consent to lower his terms so as to compete with his European brethren. But, as I think very rightly, he says, IS o; I want to raise their wages to my level; I will not consent to lower mine to theirs. If the agriculturists would only combine in. the same way that the operative classes do, we should put an end to the grinding toil! in the rural districts which only results in poverty for the settler, wealth for the middleman, and big dividends for the bank, the loan and mortgage companies, and the pawnbroking interest generally. Allow me to quote what Lord Bacon says in his Essays:—" Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and monies in a State be not gathered into few hands ; for, otherwise, a State may have a great stock, and yet starve; and money is like muck, no good unless it be spread. This is done chiefly by suppressing, or, at the least, keeping a straight hand upon the devouring trades of usury, engrossing great pasturages, and the like. (Essay on Seditions and Troubles.) For the sake of those who may read these letters and who know nothing of me, would you permit me to conclude by saying that I have been nineteen years in the colony, that during the greater part of that time I have been a freeholder in it, and am now ; that all my six children are settled here, and that one of them, and all my grandchildren, are natives of New Zealand, and that therefore, however ignorant or incapable I may be of discerning what is for the best interests of the colony, I am neither a political adventurer nor a person likelv to uphold wild and dangerous measures, destructive of the rights of property.— am. &c., R. H. BAKE well, M.D. 85, Queen-street, January '22nd.