THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1907. A PROSPECT OF DISASTER.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8982, 16 November 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1907. A PROSPECT OF DISASTER.

The Newcastle coal miners' strike, which is now seriously agitating the great commercial centres of the Australian continent, and is having its reflex action upon New Zealand, bids fair to outrival in its disastrous consequences the great maritime strike of some seventeen years ago. The machinery of industry, and consequently of commerce, is moved with coal, and the curtailment of coal supplies means industrial and commercial collapse. The strike in the northern collieries of New South Wales has been going on for some time, snd there is a probability of all the other collieries being left idle. Already serious consequences are resulting, and in the event of a general strike trade and commerce must come to a standstill in all the Australian cities dependent upon the Nev/castle mines. This would be a catastrophe the full extent of which cannot be estimated. Transit by steamer and railway would be stopped, steamers would be useless floating hulks at the wharves and in the stream, factories would be closed down, and the busy hives of industry would be deserted and silent. The gas supplies would fail, and cities would be left in darkness, for even electricity cannot be evolved without carboniferous fuel; tens of thousands of men and women would be thrown out of work, and hundreds of thousands of people would be placed in a position of great distress. Prices of food and other necessaries of life would go up, while earnings became non-existent, and the demon of starvation would, alight upon and claim thousands of the victims of cupidity for its prey. Then would come the time to put into practice the sinister suggestion of the President of the Northern Miners' Federation "that no man had a right to let his wife and .family starve whilst he knew of a pound of food to satisfy their hunger!"

In the darkened cities there would be rapine, outrage, and, perhaps, murder; for hunger in its extremity is conscienceless. These and other

horrors would follow upon the failure of the wheels of industry through the lack of coal, for wood fuel could not take it 3 place. And these horrors stare in ' the face the people of the Australian cities to-day. A stubborn resistance is being opposed to a stubborn demand, and the apparently irresistable has come in contact with the apparently immovable. There is no indication of an attempt at compromise on either side. The owners and workers seem to be equally determined, and if that attitude is kept up a little longer all the horrors we have sketched are within the bounds of possibility. We can only hope that better counsels will prevail, or that the State will take the matter in hand, as the New South Walts Premier threatens to do, and so end an unarmed war which promises to be more disastrous and deadly than a sanguinary revolution accompanied by bayoneted rifles and the discharge of heavy ordnance.