CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 913, 30 August 1889, Page 28

CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

The great dominant factors of the age we live in 'are labour and capital. s They are the genii of the riog that

adorns the finger of intellect. Their influence is over all, their action is incessant —in every corner of the earth they are apparent in greater or less degree. The progress of humanity is absolutely dependent upon them. Every phase of. human action represents them ; trade and commerce, the arts of peace, ail that teqds to humanise most, to make life most blessed, have their roots set in labour and capital. On the other hand the art of war, great campaigns, nefarious enterprises, all that degrades humanity most and blackens the face of nature, finds its source of action and power of subsistence in these same factors. They are potent, indeed, for good and for evil, are intricately , inter* woven, closely interdependent, and yet subject to violent spasms of repulsion, the particles of each coalescing with magical celerity, and forming en masse in violent and bitter antagonism. Ifike good and evil, the one could not be without the other ; each is cause and effect in itself, for each derives life from the other. Capital is the very essence of labour, labour is the broad outflow of capital. Above them both are intellect and intelligence, protean-shaped, always operating, directing, controlling the ponderous, yet agile, movements of the two tireless never-sleeping giants. Beneficently ordered the twain make all creation smile, the very bills to leap !for joy ; but if permitted to clash, their names spell disorder, ruin, desolation. The effort of the age, the one above all others, to occupy the attention of directing minds is to harmonise the relations of labour and capital, and make each one perform its functions perfectly, and the twain to move on a common axis without friction. This is the greatest, the most noble that can be imagined of all legislative enterprises. Everything els© pales into comparative insignificance beside it, because everything else is the outcome of the two, while everything we know of is contained in them. The dainty dame weaving for mere amusement with taper fingers some delicate fabric, represents labour, and so does the artilleryman as he trains his one hundred ton cannon to demolish another kind of labour a million times as costly. It is all work and all money; we are ever face to face with them, and the twain are even now effecting a silent revolution, bursting with potency, and certainly working very much more for human good than human harm. But every now and then we are reminded that the laws which control them are imperfect, and that the time of the world is wasted, and mankind hindered in his onward sweep by their senseless and brutal bickerings. How glibly enthusiasts prate about the millenium, and would hasten its coming, believing it to represent the concentrated essence of peace, order, and rest. And this is precisely what will come about when labour and

capital have buried the hatchet, have agreed to live in peace, and have made just and permanent terms for each other’s ordering—not a cast-iron, rigid permanency, but elastic, capable of easy adjustment, as may be demanded by changing conditions. For conditions , must change to the end of time : but when the factors we are dealing with are well ordered, conditions will alter without violent rupture, with a minimum of discord. Mankind will have attained the highest grade of philosophy ; he will have discovered the true way to live—the sure way to foster never-failing content. We are very far from this acme of earthy bliss just now. Discord is everywhere in our environment. Still mankind preys,, and is preyed upon ; the doings of the world as published every" day supply evidence of this. ‘And nearly all the discord arises through labour and capital being out of joint, and only in accord by fits and starts, ah/1 even then under protest from one side or another. What a ridiculous, and yet melancholy commentary, upon the boasted enlightenment of the age ia this! The intellect and intelligence of society are impotent to adjust the constantly' recurring contentions of the: wearers of long pockets and the owners o£ strong arms and teeming brains. Hence the frequency of strikes, one of which, just now, is convulsing the heart of the United Kingdom, and is making itself felt here at the antipodes. Sixty thousand, or more, labourers, the life of the shipping interest, iu other words of the British carrying trade, are out on strike in London to compel more liberal recognition from the capital in which they live and have their being. And capital has shut the door in their face, and says it will have none of them. The two are moved to blind rage at each other, and like ttvo wild, elephants are butting furiously to pogipel by force instead of constraining by reason. This deep purest of fabopr and capital has been apparent everywhere during the last few years. The toilers of the world, who, after all, really preponderate, are struggling upward for more of life’s sunshine, and, as they will not and cannot be denied, to control their efforts without withholding just dues from them ought to be the object of statesmen. It is really time to establish a, mixed tribunal before which capital pnd labopr may equitably adjust their differences. Indeed, strikes ought to he prescribed by law, because of the terrible disturbance they create in trade relations, while capital, also, should not be permitted to trifle with wages. We feel sure that coming to such an arrangement would not be so difficult as

at first sight seems —and that sorpe- - thing of the kind hast not been attempted in the United Kingdom is as" astounding as it ia'humiliating.' To accomplish it would only entail a stretch of modern thought, an extension of modern effort-, not in the slightest degree u&ra ’ to tjhe drift of hutdje opimpn. 3*or the age is ripe foysqch an innovation. S.oihe 9, f the piost; notabje p,f - latter-day strides ip ddvanqe have taken in the polpnieg, and why nut the one r>*— indicated? What credit to Few awbW'"-,. ,"V a redound yiaed * -•* - n its statesmen de- <=.■ . measure that would render differences between labour and capital self-adjusting, and would effectually put out of Court, on the one hand, strikes, on the other attempted imposition by capital. Date telegrams in another column about the London strike disclose a most serious condition of affairs.