The Star. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1897.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5805, 24 February 1897, Page 2

The Star. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1897.

Every sentence of the address delivered at Dunedin by Mr Ben Tillett — a report whereof will, be found in this issue-*-is worth reading and thinking about. It is, as was to have been anticipated from the nature of the man, an impassioned speech, full of virile force. It is the speech of a man who has endured hardships, who has been one of the toilers and moilers, who knows, by hard experience, some of the things that have to be endured in the struggle for existence, and whose soul has been saddened by a sense of . wrongs needlessly endured. But it-is also the speech of a man of strong convictions, who has seen the dawning of a brighter day, who is filled with " the hope given to men whose lives are darkened — the recognition of a common humanity and a general comradeship." His creed is this : True manhood and true womanhood means that everything that stunts or interferes with the mental, moral or physical being has no right by the laws of nature to be there. Having taken an active part in the long-sustained and sometimes bitter fight for the amelioration of the condition of the workers, he is able to look back upon much accomplished good, even though "in Great Britain today women work in quarries, work upon the pit's brow, work in the brickfields and work in the open, doing work that many men would be afraid of attacking." And this means that there is work to do. We take it that no one would more ungrudgingly admit than Mr Ben Tillett that among the capitalists and the large and small employers of labour there are numbers who are humanitarians in the best sense of the word. But the trouble is that in the fierce competitive struggle there is a compulsory adherence to existing conditions, and the employers who would fain see a better state of things often find themselves powerless; and there is that further and greater trouble, the passive resistance that has to be encountered by reason of the dull apathy or even the unscrupulous greed of workers themselves. Hence the necessity for vigorously carrying on the constitutional warfare that does battle For the cause that lacks nssiMancc, For the wro»g that nei da resistance, - For the future in the distance, .and the good that we can do. What we like best in Mr Ben Tillett's speech is the evidence of the faith that is in him — that the sun of the better day is well above the horizon, betokening the coming of the time when man shall be brother to man all the world over. Happily, we in New Zealand have not to speak from out so great a depth of necessity as Mr Bon Tillett finds himself compelled to do. By wise, progressive legislation, many of the Old World evils have been safeguarded against, and the rights of humanity have been, in a large measure, conserved. But that is all the more reason why we should be in heartfelt sympathy with the cause that Mr Ben Tillett so ably represents.