THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1923. LABOUR AND THE EMPIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18374, 14 April 1923, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1923. LABOUR AND THE EMPIRE.

In the debate on Viscount Ednam's motion asking the Government to take immediate steps to secure the fullest extension of trade within the Empire, the Labour Party in the House of Commons aligned itself with supporters of the motion. Whatever criticism members of that party felt constrained to level at particular items in the Government's Imperial programme, they expressed themselves, in the words of one member of the party, as " interested in the progress and development of the Empire as much as any other section of the House.' It must not be inferred from this that the party has abandoned its traditional policy of Free Trade. At the time of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's historic fiscal proposals, there were a few Trade Unionists of influence and position associated with the Tariff Reform League; but, as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald expressed the fact, they could be " counted on the fingers of one hand without exhausting all the fingers." In Britain, whatever departures have been made by Labour politicians elsewherein Australia, for example, they have been on occasion frankly Protectionist — the party has been preponderatingly opposed to Protection, and some of its spokesmen, including its present leader in the Commons, have been implacably hostile to Imperial preference. Nevertheless, along with this characteristic suspicion of preferential tariffs, there has gone a belief in the EmDirfi'<? —• Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's announcement is clear: "The Imperial organisation of trade routes and facilities is the proposal of the Labour Party, which desires the establishment of an efficient means for the exchange of material and intellectual productions throughout the Empire." Labour naturally sets itself against any Imperial policy that seeks to make profits for Bi'itish capitalists at the expense of either the Empire's dependencies or the alien peoples who have come within that Empire's rule. Yet, as its present British leader in Parliament avows, it has no intention of breaking the Empire to pieces;.;;" to its subject races it desires to occupy the position of friend ; to its self-governing Imperial States it seeks to be an equal; to the world it asks to be regarded as a neighbour."

With this ideal of "Imperial progress and development," which was doubtless elaborated in the debate of which the cable message is a mere epitome, no true Imperialist will be disposed to quarrel. The merely aggressive, braggart Imperialism that it sometimes pleases Labour leaders to pillory has no existence to r day in practical politics. It is a caricature. ~. The aim of every intelligent Imperialist is to make the British Empire the protector of the weak, s the liberator of the enslaved, the friend of other, world-powers, and the pioneer of universal betterment. For the establishment and growth of such an Empire the Labour Party may well work with might and main in company with other political units. Mere gratitude should prompt that rational Imperialism, for Labour owes the Empire much. There is no realm, there has been none, in which the working classes have met, and still meet, with so much sympathy. Labour partisans, influenced by a deliberate propaganda of class hatred, organised for ulterior purposes, have made much of the legal and political bonds from which the working classes of Britain have suffered. There has been a century and more of struggle for rights— the right of free • discussion, the right of combination, the right of safe and healthy conditions of work, the right of controlling funds contributed for political purposes; but this struggle for rights has not been the peculiar hardship of manual toilers. It has been part of the general striving of all • but the ruling class for elbow-room and happiness; and Labour has profited, in company with other groups in the community, from emancipations as much granted by the privileged as wrested from them. Throughout the spreading Empire Labour has been given a place in the sun second to none attained in any other part of the world. Industrial freedom and political opportunity are enjoyed in a measure that makes the British manual toiler envied. An Empire achieving this has claims upon its beneficiaries.

Labour, it may be gladly admitted, has acknowledged the validity of those claims. When the Empire was involved in war, its manual workers took their share in its defence. They did this partly for their own sakes, believing with Mr. Lloyd George that " should Germany win, God help Labour : it will come out of it worst of all." They did not fight only in the trenches. In coal-pit and workshop and shipyard they fought with pick and shovel, lathe and hammer : and into this fight, class for class, they flung themselves with as little reluctance and as much enthusiasm as other units. They knew that they were fighting, as General Smuts once told some of them, " for all those ideals which the Labour movement in all parts of the world has stood for since the days of its beginning" They knew that, if the Empire went down, all their industrial and political hopes would get an • insufferable setback. And Labour's hopes are still bound up with the Empire. Its duty is, as ever, to make the Empire strong. Sometimes, the will-o'-the-wisp of a vague internationalism leads Labour to forget all that it owes to British law and sentiment, and to leave the sure footing that they give for the doubtful gain of a nonnational junction of forces with the workers of other countries. Such a union with alien Labour, when designed to serve a revolutionary cause by organising the proletariat

against law and order everywhere, is calculated to weaken British power, and so undermine the Empire's influence on Labour's own behalf. It is a blow at the very institutions that are Labour's chief bulwarks. The fact that the motion in the House of Commons was accepted without division has more than passing interest. It is significant of the placing of " the progress and development of the Empire " above party, and Labour will be well advised to keep it there.