THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1925. THE END OF THE STRIKE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19148, 14 October 1925, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1925. THE END OF THE STRIKE.

The curtain has been rung down on the seamen's strike. It has been called off, according to cabled information, and the men in all ports affected have been advised to return to their ships. For some days it has been evident that there could be no other end to it. The men had a bad ease, and it was made worse by efforts to make it appear a good one. The strikers were only a small minority of the men in the British mercantile marine. 1 hey acted against the advice of the saner heads of their organisation. They utterly failed to arouse other workers, even those on the waterfront, to stand in with them. They rebelled against facts, against law, against reason, against their own best interests. Never was a sorrier spectacle in anti-social revolt. Its promoters chose a clouded hour in the country's shipping industry, caring nothing for the damage they inflicted on that industry and on the nation at large, including men and women and children of their own class. In their insane imaginings that they were injuring hostile employers, they brought discredit on trade unionism and embarrassed the seamen's wisest counsellors and best friends. As an assertion of rights, the strike lias been a pitiful farce. Whatever grievance the men had, they chose the very worst means of ventilating it: and that choice affords presumptive evidence that the grievance was neither so clear nor so great as they loudly proclaimed it: to be. Without entering upon a detailed review of that grievance, the general public has a basis for judgment in certain authenticated facts. Ihe rate of wages that has been a cause of complaint was agreed upon by the National Maritime Board, representative of both shipowners and seamen, and long serviceable in amicable harmonising of the views of employers and employed. The board has been an outstanding success as a medium of collective bargaining, and in this instance the resumption of the rate ruling a year ago had more than the concurrence of the men's accredited representatives. The suggestion as to the actual rate came from them, after the owners general, case had been considered. Nor was there any demur from the men until weeks had elapsed. Ihen, suddenly, without the approval of the major organisation charged with the direction of their collective action, this body of seamen declared a strike. In distant ports, as in New Zealand, they violated the contracts embodied in their articles, refusing to take the ships out on their return voyage, and further showed their disrespect for law by point-blank rejection of counsel to take their cc-.nplaint to the Board of Trade or to any other tribunal. Determined on appeal to brute force, they would not listen to reason. Upon might, rather than right, they based their cause. Is it any wonder that it was under suspicion from the first? The general public, very much concerned, although as a third party, quickly drew its own conclusions as to the validity of a case that shunned inquiry by legal process. Certain relevant facts have strengthened this conclusion, more particularly the evidence that the strike was engineered by Communists bent on damaging the seaborne trade of the British Empire. Knowledge of this shifts some of the blame from the seamen's shoulders, but it cannot exculpate them from disloyalty, nor can it save the strike from condemnation as a callous and stupid attack on national well-being. The leading actors in this farce, despite the diligence of their Communist- prompters, have come to realise the hollowness of their stage thunder and the poor figures they have cut. They may be slow to acknowledge this, but the ringing down of the curtain, before the climax announced on the play-bills has been reached, speaks for them. The diminishing sympathy of their audience, at no point very encouraging, has not been lost upon them. But for the applause from the promoters secreted in the wings and from sundry claqueurs in the house, the curtain would have finally fallen days ago. The latter have sought to make, political capital out of the strike, but they have suffered the ignominy of. all such hirelings when their persistent plaudits are left without the support of general approval. To put the matter quite plainly, and to confine comment to prominent members of New Zea land's political Labour Party, the strike has been endorsed by them, with, more or less frankness according to their courage or recklessness. Some of them have even gone the length of making the strike a subject of tearful appeal for their sup port in the election, .side-stepping certain salient facts and talking chip trap about others they selected for notice. The strike, now that if has collapsed, must be seen by them to have been worse than a crime: it was a blunder. Their future references to it, will be awaited with interest.. With which section of British Labour will they ally themselves—with the accredited leaders of the majority or with the discredited inciters of the minority 1 A l 'ill they assist, the strikers' repentant return to work, in the interests of dairy | producers and other toilers in this ! Dominion, or will they endeavour to j dissuade them from manning the j ships in compliance with the undertaking in their articles'? They have not been neutral hitherto ; they cannot very well be neutral now. They may wish to forget the strike : I but the electors whose suffrages they j woo will not forget, and they may j well ask these aspirants for political j place and responsibility where they i stand now in relation to it.

HOW MANY LAND POLICIES? Another attempt to elucidate the laud policy of the Labour Party will be found in the election manifesto issued to day. The explanation makes it different from the policy described by the candidates who have endeavoured to explain the | party's objectives to Auckland ] audiences. In it will be found no] reference to restricted application, so that only estates valued at £20,000 and upward are affected, no reference to the right of inheritance remaining unaffected. The election manifesto, in -fact, has cleared up certain points which individual candidates have tried very hard to obscure. It says "The objective of the Labour Party is the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The steps toward attainment of the objective I arc set out in the planks of the party's platform.'' Very well. What arc the steps, as affecting the land? They are described in the following clauses: — 1. The conservation of the national endowment. 2. The recognition of the interests of the whole community in land by: — (a) A laud tenure bused on occupancy and use. which shall secure to the working farmer the full fruits of his exertions. (b) The. tenant's absolute right to improvements. (e) The securing to the community of all values created by the community. (d) The elimination of exploitation of the working farmer by the institution of a State bank, and of the community by securing for it the rent of the land now principally absorbed by money-lending institutions. 3. (a) State valuation of all privatelyowned land, such valuation to remain on record as the, measure of the present landholder's interest in the land. (b) Privatelv-owned land shall not be sold or transferred except to the State. (e) The owner shall have the right to surrender his land on the valuation set out in the sub-clause (a). There are three more clauses, dealing with timber, the opening up of virgin land, agricultural co-operation and municipal milk supplies. Their exact wording does not matter. Their existence does not matter. The sections quoted will be enough for all people who have any sense of responsibility and any appreciation of what would result were the wholesale scheme of land nationalisation nailed down in clause 3, subclause (b) embarked upon. The three leading members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who have issued this manifesto have done the country a service. They have shown j that while their candidates have been talking softly of closer settlement and the bursting up of large estates, the party in its corporate capacity is standing fast by its j stated intention of working for a system by which every acre of rural land, every foot of city land, shall be resumed by the State, this leading to the speedy extinction of every kind of tenure except a Government leasehold, the probable conditions of which have not even been sketched. To suggest that the words in the manifesto and the planks of the platform quoted mean anything else is to insult the intelligence of the electors. Since the election campaign began it has been necessary to ask how many land policies the Labour Party has. Now it is quite plain that it has only one, but that the members of the party seeking election are not expounding that policy. Either they are rebelling against' what their party defines in the most precise terms as its objective rej garding all the land ol the Dominion, or they arc camouflaging I the policy which they accept, and doing so deliberately. It is for the elector, and especially the farmer elector, to decide which is the explanation. A DIVISION OF LA J>o PR. Professing an impartial zeal in the interests of all useful people, the Labour Party has endeavoured to place in its manifesto something that will appeal to every taste. Many of its proposals are manifestly expensive, but the question of cost has never discouraged the Labour Party. It works upon a very simple system of dividing the community into two classes —one to receive the benefits and the other to pay the bills. Having constantly insisted that all remissions of taxation are gifts to wealthy squatters and recipients of super-incomes, the party proposes t > obtain all the funds necessary to finance its schemes by increasing the taxation of large estates and large incomes. Put since it is essential to the success Of the programme that the land tax should burst up the large estates and since the number of superincomes is extremely small, there is | a certain prospect that these sources | would very quickly be exhausted, j That is one test of the parly's j schemes—if proposes to destroy i property and incomes above a certain level, but it also wants to preserve them as the uncomplaining victims of its taxation policy. Intelligent electors will be forced to the I conclusion that the people for whom j these, bounties are promised must j either pay for them themselves or abandon them as unattainable illuI sions. Another illustration of the I party's idea of impartial allocation S is afforded by the contrast between two items of its programme. It j proposes the restoration of wages j and salaries to the 101-1 standard and a plan of land settlement "to secure the fullest possible amount of primary production. ' Of course, the farmer is to have unlimited financial assistance, but his function

in tho socialist state is very clearly portrayed. Those already on the land and those to occupy the new subdivisions are to work—work to the fullest possible extent of their strength to produce the fullest possible amount of primary products. Workers in the towns are to have their wages restored to the 1-014 level, to live in "happy homes" of socialist garden suburbs, and generally enjoy life under the Labour Party's beneficence. It does not seem to be quite a fair division of labour —the town worker to be relieved of all the discomforts of a post-war world and the farmer to face all its difficulties without any other aid than schemes designed to make his work harder and his labour more productive. Jt is not an original conception. It was tried m Russia, with the natural result that the farmers struck work, refused to grow more than enough for their own needs, and wrecked the fantastic fabric of a socialist state. Fortunately, the issue has not been brought to the practical test in New Zealand, but that is undoubtedly the prospect raised by the Labour Party's programme. It is for those who believe that there should be a fair division of the hard work as well as of the pleasures of life to prevent any such experiment in class-consciousness being made in this country.