TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19010, 29 July 1933, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

The Industrial Covenant.

“ In my inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country,’' said President Roosevelt, in introducing his legislation for industrial recovery. “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

“ Throughout industry the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe.

“It is greatly to their interest to do this because decent living, widely spread among our 125,000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known.

After Ten Years.

“ Communism has been described as a religion, and if devotion to duty and.lofty aims for the betterment of mankind means religion, then the description is true. But it is a religion based on force and fear and not on love,” writes Miss L. Dorice White, in “Ten Years in Soviet Russia.”

“ It teaches that the end justifies the means, and it endeavours to arouse feelings of ‘ class hatred.’ The aim of universal brotherhood, ‘ each for all, and all for each,’ is becoming submerged amid Party slogans. Anyone who does not keep to the straight and narrow path of the ‘ Leninist Party Line under the leadership of Stalin ’ is looked on with suspicion, and may be treated as a ‘ class enemy ’ or ‘ opportunist ’ or ‘ saboteur.’ \

“ Ten years of life in Soviet Russia have done much to strengthen my conviction that it is not by any economic system that the world and mankind are to be saved. ’ There is probably only one verse of Scripture familiar to the majority of Russian Communists, and which is often quoted by their lenders and attributed to Lenin: (jf a man will not work, neither shall he cat.’ I believe Communism enn never succeed until they apply the doctrine taught in another passage which contains the verse: ‘lf I . . . give up my body to be burned but have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.’ ”