THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1919. NATIONAL PEACE.

Wairarapa Age, 22 December 1919, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1919. NATIONAL PEACE.

In New Zealand, as in other parts of the world, an element of unrest exists that is causing deep anxiety to those who are charged with the control of the destinies of the people. There is no telling when this unrest will develop into something serious. It is the duty of every employer of labour, and every public man, to strive to assist the Government in producing a condition which will ensure the continuance of industrial peace. It is true, as recently pointed out by Lord Leverhulme, that, in approaching the subject of industrial unrest, we are too apt to imagine that the workman is something different from his employer. What faults we may see in the workman we can equally find in the employer, but there is this little difference, that the employer has learned one or two valuable lessons in the hard battle to keep out of the Bankruptcy Court. It may be that the j workman has not yet learned them. The employer depends for increased profits on increased business. If he has one mill, his ambition is to have two; and if he has two he feels better equipped to serve the public more cheaply becaifSe his overhead charge is divided among a greater output. This ia a modern phase of the employer. The workman has seen | during tho last five years object lessons that would seem to tell him he is right. He has seen in the thirty years' quiot, peaceful pursuit of his i industry his wages raised barely 15 per cent., and he has seen his hours reduced by barely 5 to 7£ per cent. But he has seen eight million men withdrawn from competing with him, and another eight million taken from their ordinary, peaceful vocations to ; produce shot and shell, and he has achieved more in advances of wages, reduction of hours, and acceptances of all his demands in four and a half years in these conditions than he achieved in the thirty-four and a half preceding. Don't you think that each of us, if we had such a lesson as that staring ua in the face, would be a little difficult to move from the idea that to make one man's job serve two men might be a means of prolonging these artificial conditions? Don't you think that the mere handling of large sums appeals to the imagination of success and prosperity? "I believe the present success of the nation depends on the payment of high wages. Our greatest handicap in competition ! with the United States has been our | low rate of wages. You never need to fear any competitor who pays low wages. The man to fear is the man who pays high wages. The unrest we have a.t present is perfectly natural, iam certain that no nation in the I world has kept its head more cool than I ours has, and no workman served his ! country better in time of war, and could have returned after the war less demoralised by the effect of war, than have our workmen. There is in the labour unrest a general feeling on the par| of the 'Workmen that they are too much cogs in the industrial machine, and they would like to bo something more than cogs. What could be better for the nation than an ambitious workman? Could there be anything more appalling than 'apathy, indifference, and acceptance of conditions on the principle of taking it lying down? If that is the state of- the workman today, there will be disaster for the British Empire written up from one end of the map to the other. But it ig not It is ambition thai is written —a desire to get nearer to tho heart of things, to fit themselves better for taking an intelligent part in the industry in which their life is spent."