SOCIALIST AIMS

Southland Times, Issue 18968, 15 June 1923, Page 13

SOCIALIST AIMS

THE EVILS OF BOTH SIDES. “I am no politician, though I can well understand the fickleness and apathy of the public towards politics when the only real issue set before them is whether they prefer to be ruined with Socialism, or without Socialism,’’ said Sir Oswald Stoll, chairman of the London Colisseum Company, at the annual meeting (according to the Daily Telegraph). “Vast numbers of intelligent business people who do not wish to be ruined at all must view such an issue with either impatience or contempt. However, I know something of economics, and I maintain that the politicians in this national crisis should revise their views on this subject. Counsels of despair are bringing Socialistic aims to the front, because real remedies for real evils are withheld. Your Sidney Webbs, your Philip Snowdens, your Henry Georges, and other powerful writers, describe those evils well; but they mistake the enemy. They make their target Capitalism, when it ought to be the abuse or misuse of capitalism. If they would face the naked facts of Applied finance, they would realise that there is nothing in the nature of real capital to cause those evils, and, furthermore, that there is nothing in the nature of their own Socialism to cure those evils. On the other hand, your Lord Leverhulmes and your Sir Alfred Monds, are naturally, by now, too self-conscious to judge that there is anything wrong in the application of a system which has brought to them, as evidence of its virtues, such personal distinction, personal honours, personal riches, and personal power. Therefore, when, as Daniel, they come to judgment, their Very strength becomes their weakness; and in politics, in times like these, that judgment, when it is accepted, must cause even greater than they to fall from the seats of the mighty, into the political gutter. The Press did good service in specially reproducing Sir Alfred Mond’s recent speech. But Socialism was pulverised in argument before Sir Alfred Mond was born. The founders of Brunner, Mond, and Co., according to Sir Alfred Mond, were also originally pulverised in argument. But, driven upon their own resources, to their credit, be it said, they succeeded in their own way. They succeeded in their own way be it noted whether this was good for the country or not; and so with Socialism. Unless present evils are rapidly remedied, Socialism will grow like a contagious disease in unsanitary conditions. It will succeed in its own way, however bad for the country that may be. In so far as Sir Alfred’s able speech attacked Socialism, it was sound. But otherwise it rested on the fallacy that a cfaim upon capital is real capital. That is wholly I unsound.”