“ SO MUCH IGNORANCE.”

Waikato Times, Volume 106, Issue 17805, 2 September 1929, Page 9

“ SO MUCH IGNORANCE.”

(To the Editor.) Sir, —“It is astonishing to find so. much ignorauee,” says your letter from the Welfare League in Fridays issue. The writer proceeds to inform the ignorant regarding the righteousness of the present ownership oi ‘wealth i “The first savage who acquired a rude instrument of production had a right to own it and receive the ' benefit of its use. Equally so the person or persons who acquire a factory, works, etc., have a right to own, control and receive returns of wealth from the property. The • right is a natural one and the legal documents merely record its existYou see how plain it is: The first savage who acquired a rude instrument of production had a right to own It. We all agree, because the first one had to make, in order to acquire, hi 3 hunting soear, net or dugout canoe. But what of the next savage who acquired it from the first by knocking him on the head or cutting his throat while he was asleep? According to Welfare League logic (duly paid for, I trust), he also had "acquired,” and he therefore had a right to possess and to receive the benefit. Then when the savage chief who could kill his neighbours most efficiently and acquire most of their canoes and nots and hunting spears had “made his pile” and died, his heir would acquire" them and keep them as long as ho could —even as heirs do now, though they may have produced absolutely nothing. Possession after such acquisition, our Welfare teacher tells us, is a “natural right.” As long as might is right and Nature is only of the inhuman kind —“red in tooth and claw” —we can hardly dispute this. But If we are still under the law of the jungle (as our Welfare logician seems to show), then we cannot com--1 plain if those who do not posses claim the right to get possession by whatsoever means come to their hand. Personally, I don’t like being clubbed or having my throat cut whether by a capitalist or.an anti-capitalist revolutionary, and I think those who get great accumulations of wealth by inheritance are deeply to be pitied and ought to be saved from the degraded state to which they are encouraged by our inhuman laws to descend. —I am, etc.. IGNORANT JOHN. Hamilton, Aug. 3i.