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Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 54, 9 April 1914, Page 6

The facts relating to the waterside workers' strike are being eo frequently perverted for party purposes that it is pretty . hopeless to expect, the public ,to retain a clear recollection of the happenings of that trying time. Sir Joseph Ward tells us that Parliament could have passed an Act of Parliament that would have settled the trouble and leaves the public to infer that, had he been in power, this, would have been done. Perhaps he really believes it, but the public would be'more likely to do so were it not for the fact that he and-his party left an unsettled strike to their successors when they went out of office. It was not for want of laws and Parliamentary enactments that the strike dragged on so long, but because the whole body of law was for the time being rendered inoperative by the efforts of the strikers to get their way by resorting to force. They took charge of the wharves and forcibly prevented' other persons from following lawful) occupations.- Such tactics can only be justified by success. If Wat Tyler's resort to force had been successful, he would probably be regarded to-day as a hero and a liberator of the people. His success would have involved the overthrow of the existing ruling author ity in England and the substitution of another. But he was not equal to the task, any more than Messrs Semple, Holland, and Young and the rest were equipped for the struggle upon which they entered. They resorted to force without counting the cost and other elements in the community suppressed them by force. Had there been no violence in the first place there would have been no specials and no batons, [t.did not matter whether Sir Joseph Ward or Mr Semple or Mr Massey was Premier. The community would have raised the blockade of the wharves just the same, the only difference being that, with a weaker Government in power, there would probably have been considerable mortality before the business of the community resumed its normal course.