A DISQUIETING REPORT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24890, 14 April 1942, Page 4

A DISQUIETING REPORT

The information that is contained in a report which we publish this morning of opposition on the part of apparently large numbers of workers to the appeal that is now being made for funds for patriotic purposes will surprise and disappoint most members of the community. It reveals a state of feeling which lias, we are afraid, been created by the fulminations of soapbox orators against.the social conditions of the times. In some cases, of course, it may simply be that an excuse has been invented for a meanness that is proof against any of the finer emotions which a love of country might be expected to inspire. But generally it may be attributed to the effect of the infiltration into receptive minds of crude views regarding inequalities in the distribution of wealth and regarding the obligations which the prosecution of the war imposes upon individual citizens. The fiction that it is a class war in which the United Nations are engaged might have been supposed to be exploded, if not by the fact that Labour Governments within the Empire are deeply committed to the prosecution of the struggle, certainly by the fact that Russia is one of the nations that are allied with the British Commonwealth in it. But clearly it exists. And upon this false premise is built the contention that the class in whose interest the war is being fought should meet the cost of it and that, therefore, wealth should be conscripted to “ pay the piper.” Only a small effort of the imagination should be required to produce a realisation that wealth is actually being conscripted by means of compulsory loans and by unprecedentedly high taxation of incomes. Those who argue on the line adopted by these objectors to the appeal for patriotic funds seem to give no consideration to the fact that reconstruction on a gigantic scale will have to be undertaken after the war and that the capital which will be left when the conflict is over and which they would now destroy will be urgently required in order that this work may be accomplished. The claim that the responsibilities that are discharged by the patriotic societies should rest on the Government is one that would discourage and perhaps even forbid any voluntary activity directed to the provision of amenities for the armed forces. It is understandable enough when it is put forward by those who would have it that the whole cost of everything connected with the war should be a charge on wealth. Their political objective is the abolition of wealth, and this is how they would accomplish it. The soullessness of this opposition to the collection of funds for patriotic purposes is sufficiently glaring to require no emphasis. Though some of the groups of workers, on whose behalf the opposition has been expressed, are said to be representative of several thousand persons, we should regret to be told that

they were representative of work-ing-class opinion as a whole. We have enough confidence in the robust sanity of the great majority of the workers to believe that they will dissociate themselves completely from the views that are now being brought to the notice of the community and that, not without shame at the sentiments uttered by some of their number, they will cooperate whole-heartedly in the effort to raise the amount sought for in the “All Purposes ” appeal—all the more whole-heartedly, it may be, because of the stigma which the latest type of conscientious objector has cast upon the working-class movement.