WHAT LABOUR MEN SAY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 17936, 2 August 1920, Page 3

WHAT LABOUR MEN SAY

SOME PLAIN HOME TALK, t (Contributed by the N.Z. Welfare League). ROBERT BLATCHFORD. “The buyers and sellers of empty words pretend that all will be well if we establish Soviets. They would have us take it for granted that the sh.op stewards and revolutionary orators embody all virtues and all the talents, and that we have only to unfurl the Red Flag to conjure up the New Jerusalem. “The people will be wise to ignore the empty words and futile promises of these latter-day saints and their lieutenants. What have they done that we should trust them? “They have created no beautiful or useful thing. They are lacking in grace and culture. They have uo experience of business or statesmanship. They have no sense of proportion, no modesty or balance, no constructive policy. They are violent men whose speeches are deformed by malice and envy; whose inspiration springs from material selfishness. “They have no sense of discipline. They would govern the world who have not learned to govern themselves or each other. Those of them who are honest and not wholly selfish are pliilisophers of that rickety kind who imagine that evil and difficulty will disappear because they do not like them.” W. A. APPLETON, SECRETARY, GENERAL FEDERATION OF TRADES’ UNIONS. “Political strikes must either fail or end in revolution. They are not against the Capitalist, but against the community. It is not the Capitalist who suffers but the people. Against such strikes the Government must protect the people or it must surrender its functions. The effect of such strikes is to decrease production and increase the price of all commodities.” THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY DECLARES: “As democrats and ”as practical politicians seeking to realise socialism the party is opposed to all dictatorships, whether by a church, a king, or emperor, an aristocracy, an oligarchy, a plutocracy, or by usurpers such as Lenin and Trotsky.” MR. STUART BUNNING. AT THE BRITISH TRADE UNION CONGRESS. “ ‘Direct action’ meant revolution —the project resolved into a desperate gamble, with the loves of men, women and children at stake. He did not believe the Government would surrender.” MR. BLATCHFORD AGAIN. “Direct action would lead' to starvation and the paralysis of industry. It. would be the duty of the Government to use the full powers of the State, military as well as civil, in the interests of the people and for the safety of the Empire.” MR. G. N. BARNES. “Organisation, if controlled by those animated only by materialistic considerations, might get a strangle hold on the community.” and he expressed the fear that “some organisations on the Labour side were getting under the influence of those who wanted to pull down the pillars of, ths State on the off chance > that something would arise from the ruins more to the.r ,iking.” MR. J. H. THOMAS SAYS: “In a constitution like ours, where I political power’is given to the work- j ing classes, anv section that attempts I to hold up the nation to ransom is I not only defying the law but is es- ; tablishing something that is the re- : verse of all democracy and demo- i cratic institutions.” MESSRS CLYNES, J. T. BROWNLIE AND F. H. ROSE, M.P. All condemn “direct action” as being against democracy; the lastnamed says: “Every man who foments the strike in any form is a social enemy; any attempt to restrict or impede production is the act of a social assassin.” BRIEF COMMENT. We are told that it is wrong to condemn the New Zealand Socialists -“j—M.’sP. and others —who are toying with Bolshevism, excusing “go slow” and other forms of- syndicalist “direct action,” because that is speaking against Labour. In face of the utterances of the prominent British Labour men quoted we say, “Fudge! What silly talk that is, ‘against Labour’,” are not leading Labour men pronouncing the very same views?