THE THREE TAILORS.

Observer, Volume XXVIII, Issue 26, 14 March 1908, Page 2

THE THREE TAILORS.

"We, the People of Auckland." ANY stranger to Auckland who based his judgment upon the amount of space devoted by the daily newspapers to the business of local institutions might be excused if he assumed that the Trades and Labour Council was the most important body in the city. To be sure, the impression would be only temporary. As soon a's the visitor probed beneath the surface of things, he would discover that only the daily papers, competing for the pennies of the trades unionists, take the Trades Council at all seriously. To the average citizen the Council is merely a source of entertainment. The Rosaers, and the Spratts, and the Pratts, and others of the same kidney, may be very important personages in their own eyes, but to suggest anywhere in town that they are in any sense representative men would only be to provoke ridicule.

Nevertheless, the Trades Council is gradually arrogating to itself the position of censorship over the whole community. Let any oneof its members rise and repeat some ex parte assertion, picked up from the man in the street, as to alleged misdoings of responsible people, and straightway the Council is ready with a resolutioii condemnatory of the accused. Really responsible bodies are old - fashioned enough to feel it incumbent upon them to make someinquiry before coming to aconclusion. The Trades Council is bound by no such archaic restriction. The casual statement of a councillor is sufficient to lash it into furious indignation, and to provoke a hysterical resolution. Now it is the City Council that comes in for discipline, again it is the Hospital Board, another time the Salvation Army, but each is tried and condemned without a hearing. And farcical as the idea is, the wrathful expressions and the humorous asides of the labour Solons are recorded by the Herald and Star with the same amount of detail as the discussions of, say, a vital party question in Parliament.

But why, after ail, is the Trades and Labour Uouncil taken so seriously ? If its title denoted all that it should mean, the Council ought to be the representative of labour in the city. But is it? Do its own constituents treat it seriously ? The history of local affairs supplies an answer. Time after time members of the Labour Council have attempted to secure election to the City Council, but the result has been pathetic. The working man of the city will have none of them. Generally speaking, ihe Trades Council candidate has found himself at or near the foot of the poll. At any rate, the Unionist agitators cannot secure election, though, if they possessed the confidence of the working men success ought to be easily attainable. Even in school committee elections the agitators have been ignominiously rejected. And yet, because, as the assertive members of unions, they

manage to force themselves to the front and constitute themselves members of the Trades Council, they are treated by the preps as persons of weight, if not dfgnity. The position is laughable.

It is even doubtful whether the Trades and Labour Council takes itself seriously. To judge from the multiplicity and variety of the subjects upon which it pronounces every month, the idea seema unlikely. May it not be that the periodic assemblies for the discussion of all subjects under the sun, with all Auckland, through the press, listening to their words of wisdom, is a pleasant recreation to the Council members? As to the press appraisement of them, the subjects of debate are generally more piquant than those ventilated before a borough council or road board, and therefore make the livelier copy, whatever may be its actual value. That, probably, is the secret of the publicity given to a body ta which no one dreams of imputing any sense of responsibility. But irresponsible people are apt to waste their force upon hunts after mares' nests,, and that has been the misfortune of the Council so often that even its powers of entertainment begin to pall.