REDS REPULSED.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11438, 20 August 1912, Page 5

REDS REPULSED.

PICTURESQUE JOURNALISM,

Down at Kaitungata the Red Federation of Labour, which has reason to be pale about the prospect at Waihi, hoped, no doubt, for a little comfort, but to-day it lies defeated on Otago's field. Tlie strike there has collapsed. The employers, who lirnily stood for arbitrational unionism against antiarbitrational syndicalism, have won. It is not our wish to gloat over the discomfited Federation.' Our purpose is to peint to the hopelessness of its fight against the common-sense of the whole community. Some time ago the public were sitting down comfortably, and the Federation, by standing on tip-toe and craning its neck, imagined that it was taller and bigger in every way than the public, but the public is now standing up, and towers above the challenger. The Federation may indefinitely delay the day of its final humiliation, but that day must come if this revolutionary organisation persists in its present tactics. The official organ, the Maoriland Worker, seems hard pushed now for rhetoric to keep a full red colour on the face of the ultra-Socialist body. As an indication of the peculiar state of mind into which the otlicial exponent of the Federation \s doctrines has lapsed, we may quote an extract from an article which purported to be a serious criticism of a journal, the lnangahua Times, which dared to attack the Federation. "Now," says the Worker, "the luaugahua Times is a stark-staring, hairteasing, curse utt'ring, moan-mutt'ring, flesh-flaying, moon-baying, eye-blazing, fire-grazing, mouth-foaming, mindroaming lunatic in its editorial ravings about the Federation, and Scmple to it is like unto a red rag to a bull, only more so—much more so. The mention of the name alone of Semple sets the Times bellowing and rampaging like a paddoekful of bulls, and the presence of the man himself within a hundred miles of his office makes the editor take several different kinds of fits, in which he sees red ruin, blue snakes, ruddy revolution, green spiders, carmine chaos, cloven hoofs, forked fangs, demoniacal Semples, Hiekeys and Webbs, and divers other weird and wonderful things, the like of which were ne'er beheld by any human even in the throes of the most violant attack of alcoholic 'd.t's' " Is it not plain that the Federation's case must be desperate if such extravagant language is deemed necessary to keep the members in good heart? We notice also, that Mr Robertson, M.P., who was warmly congratulated by the Worker when he was elected, is now assailed by tho Reds, because he has ventured an opinion that "the executive showed a weakness in not repudiating tho precipitate action of the Waihi Union."