THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, MAY 6, 1926. A TYRANNOUS ONSLAUGHT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19320, 6 May 1926, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, MAY 6, 1926. A TYRANNOUS ONSLAUGHT.

In launching the general strike, the leaders of tho Trades Union Congress have sought to establish tyranny in Britain. They make no appeal to reason. They endeavour by brute forco to compel the country to accept the miners' terms. Whatever merit that cause may or may not have is now nothing to the point. In the new situation created by the general strike, discussion of the miners' case and of the stato of the coal industry is frankly abandoned. The strike's promoters turn from right to might. War, not law, is their order of the day. Arsenals, not tribunals, concern them. This is ever the way when "direct action" is Labour's chosen policy. It is a primitive method. Tho only law it knows is the law of the jungle. "No agreements, no boards; fight the capitalists, fight the employers, fight everybody"—in these very words the revolutionary leaders phrased their programme a few years ago. At that time they threatened Britain with a general strike; but then they did not carry their threat into execution. Since then, Communist influence has ascrted itself in Britain, and to this influence must be attributed the ruinous conflict that lias been so madly precipitated. When tho council of the congress went to Mr. Baldwin with this weapon in their hands, he knew it was no idle .threat; but he had no honest recourse save to accept their challenge. The lists were set between reason and ruffianism ; and it will ever stand to his credit that, patient attempts at negotiation having failed to impress them, he took up tho gauntlet these leaders flung into the arena. To have yielded to their brow-beating tactics would have been a betrayal of the trust reposed in him by an overwhelming majority of Britain's people, and whatever the consequences his course was clear. The issue has resolved itself into the question: "Who is to rule 1 ?" The choice lies plainly between the people's trusted representatives in Parliament and the revolutionary directors of this fanatical upheaval. The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, not given to unconsidered speech, has rightly described this onslaught as a blow at the very vitals of the community. Should it succeed, Britain would be flung back into barbarism.

There is no likelihood of its succeeding, for Britain has an ingrained aversion to tyranny in all its forms. That very love of liberty which has grown in it with the centuries, and developed there a broad tolerance to protesting minorities, will resent this latest attempt to establish a tyranny. Already the Government's determination that the country's interests shall be paramount above all classes is attracting general support, and the revolutionary leaders will find themselves opposed by an invincibly resolute host of British men and women, prepared to endure privation and peril of life rather than allow the country to pass under this menacing misrule. That the struggle will be no parlour battle is evident. Good humour was reported to prevail at the outset. It cannot last. It is already breaking under the strain that a general strike inevitably imposes. The promoters of the strike, fearful of provoking disastrous reprisals, are counselling their followers to avoid violence. They are trying to discriminate, in their hampering of transport, between the passage of food and less essential things—a weirdly ironical effort on the part of men directing a fight that, in the last resort, is deliberately aimed at the sustenance of the whole community. That attempt to control their followers will fail. It has failed already: against the scene at Blackwall Tunnel, where food and other essential supplies have been allowed to pass while general transport has been hampered by the strikers' pickets, must be set the attack on Government food lorries at the East India Docks. Violence will beget violence. The leaders who have sown the wind will reap the whirlwind. They will have to reckon with the increasing irritability that diminishing rations will bring among their own following, in the ranks and behind them. The violence they are at pains to discountenance will break bounds, bringing swiftly a recoil that will scatter their forces. For that is the destined end of all such frantic onslaughts everywhere, and in no country in the world is it so sure to come swiftly as in Britain. History records many instances of revolutionary overthrows of existing orders, but it is straining language to class so foolish and criminal an onslaught as this with revolts against tyrannous oppression. They were protests of reason and liberty: this has abandoned argument and violates public rights. In the interests of the general community, against whom—not against the mineowners —tins attack is organised, the Government has no option but to repel lawless force with the force of the lav/. It cannot lie too plainly stated that the issue of the notices for a general strike ha« completely changed the complexion of the struggle. It has ceased to be one of miners against mineowners, and become one of an unscrupulous, reckless and heartless - minority against the general community, even against many of its own class. Thero are manifest signs that the council of the Trades Union Congress has provoked the hostility of many

unionists, and that these will array themselves against the party of .misrule. It is safe to say that, in the upshot, the congress will be weakened. It has been, despite the efforts of Mr. Mac Donald and others to rid it of seditious elements, a hotbod of revolutionary aims. It has never been representative of Labour generally in Britain. Now, compelled to choose between loyalty to the leaders of violent revolt and loyalty to the public good, many unionists in affiliation with it are sure to break with it utterly. The outcome may thus provide some compensation for the terrible havoc of even a brief experience of a general strike, and administer a salutary check to the men bent on setting up a new tyranny in Britain.