THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1894.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9494, 25 April 1894, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1894.

—■ ♦ _ One of the strangest of the many strange phenomena in the world at present is that of "Coxey's labour army," which is marching on Washington, is arranging to aid by a force a general strike amongst the collieries, and spreading fear over a large district of country. The leader, Coxey, has declared that 60,000 men will shortly reach Washington, and remain until their demands.-ire acquiesced in by the Legislature. Detached bands have seized trains, and the towns on the route hav« given supplies to prevent these hordes front settling down upon them. The nearest historical parallels to this kind of thing have been the jacqueries, or insurrections of the peasants of the Middle Ages. But these were caused by the feudal system,and the oppression of the nobles. The peasants were* then treated like beasts of burden; they were virtually the property of the lords on whose estates they lived; all the produoe of their labour was the property of their master except the small quantity of coarse fare necessary to keep them alive, They took no part in politics, they had no political rights, and indeed had no civil or personal rights. They were driven into insurrection by starvation and oppression. It was thought that the world was done with that kind of thing, at all events, and if there was a chance of anything of that nature it would be in Russia, or somewhere to which the blessings of universal suffrage and one-man-one-vote had not penetrated. But here we have it in the most advanced country on the face of the earth (as the Americans are fond of declaring), a country which has no monarch, no hereditary family of princes, which is not blighted by the cold shade of an aristocracy, which has no peerage, no bench of bishops ; a country where there is no law of primogeniture, where land is not monopolised by a class, where any man who has a dollar in his pocket may be a landowner. It is somewhat humiliating for American and Republician institutions. The peasant insurrections of the middle ages pointed to a great evil, or rather to an aggregation of evils, and so in like manner does this levying of a ** labour army" in the United States. In a thickly-peopled country like England, there might be a collapse of some industry employing in a particular locality hundreds of thousands of bands. This might occur through a war abroad, like the war in America, or through a sudden failure of demand. For these people there would be no resource, for there would be no room for them on the land. But in America there is still plenty of waste land, and the industries there estab-

lished do not depend upon ' foreign demand. And yet there is a labour army " marching on the capital, in order to coerce the Legislature into giving them what they want. Anyone may turn round on these men and say that if evil has resulted from bad or vicious legislation, they themselves are to blame. They are to blame for actively doing wrong or for allowing wrong to be done. The disturbance in American trade has arisen from various causes, one of ' the most prominent being the mad policy of the Government buying up the silver produced at a higher price than its market value. That was a popular movement, urged by parties in the Legislature so powerful that they could not be resisted. The system was bound to come to an end, and the longer it was carried on, the more calamitous the collapse at last. The protection policy of America has resulted in the creation of monopolies and rings of a more hateful and selfish character than the tyrannical nobles of feudal Europe. The system is now being assailed; but it will die hard. The change to a better state of things will not be achieved without much suffering all round, and especially to the working classes. But they were its chief supporters, under the idea that they were promoting the prosperity of the country, and were doing something to annoy England. But this insurrection—for it may amount to that—shows that democracy may be the cause of much the same evils as the grossest forms of aristocratic government. Votes should be weighed as well as counted. It is not possible to abolish all the evils of society simply by giving every man a vote.