HERESY HUNTERS.

Observer, Volume XXXVII, Issue 34, 28 April 1917, Page 2

HERESY HUNTERS.

A Silly Pursuit

SEVERAL hysterical people have been flooding the local Press with angry letters about Germans at large. These attacks are aimed at two persons, and the people suffering with hysteria don't quite know what it is all about, don't show how they are communicating with the Kaiser, and don't indicate the damage these persons are supposed to be doing. If these two persons are a menace to us, ar.d the military authorities and the police can't stop the menace, the letter writers should supersede the. authorities, and then you would see. It wouldn't matter much to the hysterical persons who was hanged to a lamp-post as long as the authorities did something outrageous to justify the shrieks. There is a matter, however, which these hysterical persons don't write about—British traitors to their own country. We know the German i&an enemy. He comes with Aveapons in his hand, and we all know what to do about him. Bmt we are in the hands of the man who deliberately, and against the Empire which protects him, aids the Kaiser by stopping or threatening to stop British industries. We do not even now think the coalminer« tare wholly anti-British or acknowledge that "go slow" and strike is the gravest possible act of treachery that British men can be guilty of.

The grotesque phase of these coalminers' strike.s is the reason they give for striking. They plan to stop New Zealand industry (so they say) as a protest against conscription which does not touch them 3 for they are exempt. Thoy are, in a large number of cases, young fit men who are permitted to stay at home and earn very large wages while other young men are fighting to maintain miners and all others alive and unmolested. They say they have no grievance against the mine-owners or their terms of employment, and so they deliberately plan to fight their employers and the whole public who are liable to conscription. It is the most bizarre situation. The miners are in a small proportion of the. population—an infinitesimal percentage. Yet they believe themselves fully equal to imposing a more drastic obedience to their orders than any State dare impose. They claim preposterously to rule the country; to be the masters of every coal-needing industry, to dominate trade, lighting, food supply, shipping; to plunge cities in darkness, and to bring the populace on its knees to a minute body of men who have a perfectly fanciful grievance against an existing law Which declares (with the miners) that all men are equal, and all men liable to serve the State. * 0 B Here are, if the hysterical heresy hunters only knew it, persons worthy of their pens. It is a waste of time to chase a German tied hand and foot. It is no waste of time to prevent, by all reasonable means, the absolute domination of a whole country by a small mob of disgruntled men, misled into the belief that freedom is fighting one's kith and kin. To all intents and purposes these people are recruits to the Kaiser's armies. There is no means they could contemplate or invent more helpful to him than stopping of trains, ships, lighting and industries. By their conduct they lay down the intolerable maxim that Britain should consent to be beaten by the Germans —for she would have been beaten without forced service. It is assumed that the miners who are at present engaged, or who have downed tools, are the only men in New Zealand who can mine coal, and they therefore feel themselves to bo on "a soft wicket." Seeing that they are exempt from military service because they are coal-miners, it would be quite fair to immediately and forcibly enlist them as soldiers the moment they strike. They use force against the whole, of their kith and kin. The whole of the sufferers should morally fight the coalminers. The miners expect the war they are waging against their own blood to be one-sided. They can conceive of no retaliation. They ''demand," and we as a community ase expected to obey. The miners believe apparently that they can compel a country which already has conscription to repeal it _by stopping its coal power industries. The country which permits this entirely Prussian method to influence it in obedience to a few men would be the feeblest country on earth. The miners do not contemplate the possibility of making enemies of the whole country, and if they do the intolerable injury of stopping industry they will deserve the retaliation of a country which stands more than any other country on earth. Poli-tV-ns are pacific persons, especially where they have no alternative. It is the. alternative which would hit these pro-German miners the hardest. If the Government, on being throaterrr' with the direst mishap which could happen to us, had the power to immediately order all those traitors off the ground and put in patriots the trouble would end at once. But the miner doesn't obey orders. He gives them, and between the "boss" with the pick and the public there are going to be some strained relations, unpleasant for the New Zealand soldiers of the Kaiser.