Poverty Bay Herald PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, MONDAY, MAY 27, 1912. ANOTHER GREAT STRIKE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1273, 27 May 1912, Page 4

Poverty Bay Herald PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, MONDAY, MAY 27, 1912. ANOTHER GREAT STRIKE.

Great Britain is m tlie throes m another great strike of transport workers. Otoly a few months have passed' since the former strike, which paralysed industry throughout the United. Kingdom for several, weeks on account of the refusal of these . workers to handle freight until their grievances had been adjusted, and m the interim there has been the strike of railway servants, an affair of considerable magnitude, and the great coal strike, ended only six weeks ago. This latter industrial upheaval, which lutsted five weeks, involved flosses to; the community estimated thirty-six million pound's sterling. That, is the.; computation of Mr Hoit Schooling^ the eminent statistician, who assessed the damage as follows: — Direct losses to miners: - 'Wages ... ... £6,000,000 lrade funds and personal- say- •. ™8* ■ - •;. ... . 2,000,000 Direct losses to workers other than miners ... „. ... , ... 8,000,000 IjOss m, coal production ... ... 10,000,000 Loss iif production m industries other than coal 10,000,000 ■ £36,000,000 And now another strike is m progress which will run into many millions more. Strike begets strike, and industrial warrare appears to be likely to continue until enlightened . civilisation devises some effectual remedy. As Mr Benjamin Kidd, the author of that pioneer work "Social Evolution" points out m a letter to the London Times, it was only a week before the coal strike that men were debating at our centres of leaiing the theories of. Mr Norman • AngelTs book, "The Great. lllusion," with its conception of the future impossibility of war because of the business disturbance that war would produce between great nations. And yet a few days later Britain was m the midst of «, war not outside its frontiers, but within them, by which the workers of a single industry had at a moment's notice produced almost as great an economic disturbance as would have followed the declaration of war against Biitahi by a rival Power. Mr Kidd goes on to argue that social legislation must be used as an effective weapon against syndicalism, and his argument receives support m the afterthoughts 'of the strike of a number of the leading papers. "Every party m the State, nobles 1 , , 'middle-classes and middlemen," he wrote, "has endeavored m its time to identify the State with its own interests. The quarrel of. society with each of them m turn, m the struggles of Jiistory' has been that they have pll endeavored, when they held .the {jttiate m their power, to exact from the «omnvunity more than they were en^ titled to for services rendered m, terms of social utility. Organised .label* is now simply endeavoring to do "as all the parties w.hich preceded it ' have done — to hold the community up for "the most it can extract from it. And the power of effectively* organise^ labor is probably far greater than that, of any 'of .the classes which . have- preceded it. Syndicalism must be dealt .with m the same manner as the ■classes that have preceded it have been dealt with. Its opponents must meet the demands made upon them with a truer conception.- of the interests 'of the community than, syndicalism has go^. They must be prepared to throw overboard much of the creed of crude economic individualism under which the middle-class of the nineteenth century exploited the coni-' munity ; they must be prepared to learn that . the . system of economics which has allowed private individuals to accumulate- fortunes ranging .to' scores of millions -provides a very- inefficient armory of weapons to hurl at millions of workers m quest of ,a: minimum wage of 5s per day.. The London Daily Telegraph, dealing with, the Tecently-ended coal strike and., tn.6 concession of a statutory minimum "" wage which had been granted by Parliament, said : "Parliament has been driven to forego its old principle of refusing to interfere m the quarrels of Capital and Labor, and has intervened m a manner which no one would have believed possible five years ago. It has created a precedent which is. sure to prove disastrous, unless, warned by its recent unhappy experience, it takes courageous and statesmanlike steps to protect the community against, being held up a second time, either by the. Miners' federation or by any other masses of organised labor. • The moral for the nation' is to devise for. itself , measures of self-protection. No plainer duty lies before the responsible \ Government of the day." It is qiu'ite ]'dear that this internecine warfare cannot go on month after month without involving disaster to the nation. Parlfament must devise some measure to bring: contentment to the masses and at the *ame : time to combat the chaotic .and* anti-social movement of the syndicalists.