The New Zealand Times. MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1912. WAIHI AND THE FEDERATION

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8257, 21 October 1912, Page 6

The New Zealand Times. MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1912. WAIHI AND THE FEDERATION

Additional members of the Waihi Miners’ Union have decided to go to gaol.

Another contingent of strikers at Waihi having decided not to give guarantee for peaceable behavior are going to prison. Consequently the Federation of' Labor continues to protest against “the police' throwing men into dungeons” and to exhort all workers to come to the assistance of the unfortunate victims of “Capitalism.” That there is something supremely pathetic about these men going to gaol none of us would care to deny, but the sympathy they excite is that felt for men who aro misguided, not for thoso who may be the victims of injustice at the hands of public authority. There has been no “throwing into dungeons.” What has happened is that practically every one of these men has foregone hi liberty in preference to signing a bond of good henavior. Prison has been deliberately chosen in preference to personal freedom, and, in considering the merits of the federation’s case this cannot he overlooked. Not one of these strikers need be under restraint a day longer than he personally desires. All these theatrical appeals for protection, this windy talk about “bludgeons” and “batons” comes in the end to no more than a confession that tho tactics followed by the federation leaders carry no further than an empty defiance of the law.

It is deplorable, of course, that these men should bo going to gaol, but it is still worse that the leaders of their . organisation, knowing as they do that the strike was a blunder from the first, should be perambulating the country urging their followers to give still more of their earnings in support of a campaign entered recklessly into and continued out of sheer vanity. Strikers are going to prison, what does that settle? If they elect to be released in what respect will the working class gain? It is thus all through the federation’s campaign. It achieves nothing, gets not a single stop forward, and by fomenting uproar and confusion leaves Labor infinitely worse off in an economic sense than before. Encouraging men to go to prison in preference to signing bonds for lawful conduct, impoverishing (the workers by /precipitating turmoil and (collecting levies on wages and wrecking the finance of the unions concerned in these useless struggles seems far from an enlightened method of campaigning in the workers’ interests.