HUMANITARIAN POLITICS.

Timaru Herald, Volume XC, Issue 13296, 27 May 1907, Page 6

HUMANITARIAN POLITICS.

Australian politics, say* -Mr Ramsay Macdonald, are to be permanently uinuenced by the fact that they rest upon those generously democratic sentiments of hymanitarianism which characterise the life of the early ~ settler, the bushman, tje shearer. Australia is only beginning to entertain those absurd notions of the lights of property which mean human slavery. The sentiment of Australia- is that human beings should live decently and happilyHence her efforts to kill sweating, break up large estates, fix wages by judicial decision, and so on.

Protection, for instance, receives its most stubborn support in Australia from the idea that humanitarian treatment of workers means a high cost of production, and it is being developed on original lines because its humanitarian rather than its industrial aspects are being followed out by the politicians. The sentiment of humanitarian democracy will determine Australian politics long after class and economic interests have become much stronger than they are. One may argue that a good deal of Australian politiciil experiment deals only with superficial things, and that no scientific attempt has ever been made to analyse the causes of Australasian prosperity during the last decade. There is .something in such an argument. Australian politics, like her poetry, deal with experience, not with thoughts, and such politics are prone to mate wrongly effect and cause. Here one discovers a serious weakness in Australian labour experiments. There is practically no economic teaching and no economic literature in Australia. What has been written about her industrial legislation is either indiscriminating panegyrics or equally indiscriminating jeremaids. She is prosperous, her workers have shared in her prosperity; she has almost succeeded in weeding from her garden the ugly and tainted plants of sweating. Why? Naturally she thinks it has been owing to the industrial legislation and the protection with which she has been experimenting. These have had their due effects, but their influence has by no means been on one side, and other potent influences have also been at work. I could discover no attempt that had been made to analyse these causes and assign to each its proper place;