The Daily News. FRIDAY, MARCH 31. MUCH WORSE THAN WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 266, 31 March 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, MARCH 31. MUCH WORSE THAN WAR.

The hearts of British and American statesmen have lately bubbled over with brotherly love. Some of them have almost got to the stage of asserting that there shall be no more international bloodshed, that it is wicked to cut each other's throats, and doesn't pay, anyhow. It would have to be a good healthy skirmish in a modern campaign to get rid of one hundred and fifty men, and the men would at least have a chance of retaliation before "losing the number of their mess." Many of the advocates of international peace wage perpetual war—brutal, soul-destroying, criminal, villainous war. They wage it with the help of Tammany, in the sweatshops, by means of national and municipal graft, in thousands of factories the world over, everywhere where hunger and necessity drive victims into the slaughter-pens of the criminals who slay but are never slain. Sometimes one wonders at the apparent unreasoning hate of the driven for the drivers; that they adopt physical means of righting wrongs, and take instinctive vengeance on the calculating slayers. We do not mean that the owners of a New York sweat shop deliberately set fire to a factory because they desired to incinerate one hundred and fifty girls, but on the evidence available it is certain that New York authorities slaughtered these girls. In a factory wherein five hundred persons worked there were no fire escapes. The girls who were burnt in this nine-storey hell '"could not speak English." They were, therefore, imported from Europe under the American slave system, whereby callous millionaires who play with human life are able to sweat folk with indifference and kill them, if necessary, without interference from authorities, blind to every other consideration than that of personal gain. There will be no redress. These women were probably unknown as far as the New York authorities were concerned. If one hundred and fifty millionaires who had preyed on the people for years had been burnt it would have been different. But these peasant girls, hoping to achieve success "in the freest country on God's airth, sir"—who cares? No horrors of the negro slave trade are more horrible than those of the modern trade in white folk, ground in the mills of commerce to give gold to people who don't need it, and to supply the wherewithal for extension of the trade. The owners of the sweat-shop will not be banged. They will have to set about importing some more slaves at less wages in order to make up leeway. New York will forget. There will be a few more fire-escapes built, and the sweaters will continue to sweat the slaves—until the slaves revolt. Then constituted authority, with the blood of previous victims on its hands, will virtuously use swords, batons and rifles as antidotes to hunger, shivery and revolution. Tf the New York authorities permit the condition of one factory to be such that one hundred and fifty foreign slaves are burnt in it. it permits the conditions to exist in innumerable other factories, and the same results are possible. The rottonne.s* f ,f the system has never been adequately fought in the L'nited States because commercial criminals outnumber the just, and control the larger purse. Money is superior to law. and the man with dollars can cheat, even the hangman. Tn baby countries a national sentiment against the methods employed in America may be effective in preventing the growlh of slaverv. We were tolil bv a member of Piirhimcnr. the oilier day that twenty years ago sweating was common in the small New Zealand factories, ft was easier to tackle the evil in a small community, and it is stated that sweating and its accom-

panying evils have diminished. But the fact that it did exist is proof positive that permission to sweat would be as quickly taken advantage of in New Zealand as in the United States, Britain, Russia or anywhere else. The "get-rieh-quick" piania is common to all countries. The means for getting rich quick are the same in every country. No man can achieve riches by himself. He must exploit his fellow man —or his fellow man's sister. Slave-driving to the "get-rich-quick" man is called by another name. His word for it is "enterprise." "Enterprise" in some countries means that dollars can buy any existing authority, can unwrite building laws, cancel the right of an individual to liberty, or even sign his death warrant. The New York municipality signed the death warrant of one hundred and fifty girls, who are much more necessary to the world that one hundred and fifty commercial sharks, by subjection to money influence. In'illustration of the assertion that most of the "rights of man" are regarded as belonging solely to the persons who can pay for the most of them in cash, one might call attention to a recent wreck. In giving the list of the apparently drowned the scribe who sent it carefully mentioned the names of the first saloon passengers, dismissing the others as unworthy of notice in the words, "and thirty-one in the second saloon." It is a very fair example of the modern idea of the relative value of the human being who has dollars with that of the person who has pence. The wires ring with the story of a royal cough or an imperial pimple. The sick daughter of a multi-millionaire meat packer of unsavory reputation is wept over in every paper in America, Britain and the colonies. But any one of those 150 New York slave girls had as valuable a life as the millionaire's daughter or the Prince of Wales. Tt will be remembered i that the United States of America is a "democratic" country. Everybody is free. The millionaire is free to sweat factory hands, and the factory hands are free to be sweated. No Croatian peasant need go to America. She is perfectJy free to stay at home. She need not get burnt if she stays outside a sweatshop, and if she is fool enough to court death—that's her funeral. It is a cheerful philosophy—for the millionaire. Who doesn't envy him his power to use human beings as fuel?