REASON PREVAILS.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 July 1933, Page 6

REASON PREVAILS.

To be able to think reasonably for one ' self rather than to be blindly led is per* haps the highest attribute and truest test of an enlightened democracy. Indeed what else would be the object of a free and universal education system such as New Zealand enjoys to-day? The principle being accepted, it is a tribute both to the educational system of the Dominion and to the personal appreciation of facts in their proper perspective that the unemployed relief workers are generally speaking declining to endorse the call of the Hawke’s Bay section of the Relief Workers’ Union for a national strike. Whether there is differentiation or not in the pay and conditions of the Hawkes Bay relief workers—and on the information available it seems quite possible that the differentiation if any is in favour of Hawke's Bay rather than against—the wrong way of seeking a remedy was to call for a national strike. Not only do such strikes invariably terminate with the striker worse off than he was to begin with, but in the interim there is almost always a loss of the sympathy of the rest of the community. It is markable testimony to the genuine desire of the community as a whole to help the relief worker that throughout the Hawke’s Bay trouble special efforts have been made by tire social service committees to feed and clothe the men even while they were on strike. But there is a limit to all things, and the chairman of the Napier unemployment committee has announced with misgiying that public sympathy is definitely waning. No one could reasonably object to the organisation of the unemployed so that their views and desires may be properly expressed, but it would be another matter if such organisation were made an instrument for bludgeoning into submission the rest of the community which is already making tremendous sacrifices, both compulsory and voluntary, in order to help the relief workers. It would be not only a curious anomaly; it would be a quixotic tragedy that could have only one ending. A large section of the relief workers, however, have definitely intimated that they refuse to be stampeded. The pity of it is that already many unfortunate men and their families have suffered because of the lack of judgment and logic on the part of a subversive element