The Strike Agitator.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 8, 21 August 1912, Page 44

The Strike Agitator.

MR. KIPLING’S GRIM ALLEGORY. "Ail power, each tyrant, every mob Whose head has grown too large, Ends by destroying its own job And gets its own discharge. "And man. whose mere necessities Sweep all things from his path, .Shivers meantime at their decrees, And deprecates their wrath!" This is Mr Rudyard Kipling’s preface to a bitterly ironical attack on the methods of the modern strike agitator, which he contributes to the "National Review.” Mr Kipling makes his onslaught in the form of a kind of allegorical short story. The scene is laid in the lower regions, where the men who invented the various world forces which have passed away are gathered together. There is the man who invented stonethrowing, the man who superseded stonethrowing by inventing bows and arrows, and Friar Bacon, who made bows a back number by inventing powder. Then there is a Pope, who invented “spiritual” power, and one of Caxton’s men, who helped to overthrow it. They have just discovered how each tyranny brought into existence a new power which abolished it, when “Mr Sugden” enters and joins in the conversation. “Mr Sugden” is the agitator who engineered the coal strike. He tells his comrades down below that he is called “Honest Pete.”

When they ask him what he has been “up to,” he replies: “I’ve been bringing the Community to its knees.” The reply is received with shouts of mirth.

“Power was our trick,” say® Mr Sugden. “We’ve starved the beggars! No cooking, no lighting, no heating, no travel, no traffic, no manufactures, till they’ve made their peace with Us!” “Only justice an’ our rights,” says Mr Sugden. “We weren’t pleased with Society as it existed. We were—or, rather, I should say, we are—goin’ to reorganise society from top to bottom; an’ if the community don’t like it, it ean lump it.”

Mr Sugden boasts that the community, “man, -woman, and child, is bound to come to its knees or be starved.”

Mr Kipling describes in a very gruesome way how Sugden is followed to hell by babies who iuuve died of starvation, an old woman who has committed suicide, and other victims of the strike who have been driven to various kinds of desperation. He continues: —•

“Then eame the elderly toothless deaSj ent off before their time by a few days’ cold and under-feeding, who wailed ion the dear remnant of life out of which they said Sugden had defrauded them. Behind them were ranged the drawn and desperate faces of such as had spent all their savings in one month and now! looked forward to certain pinch and woij —not for themselves, as they muttered, but for their families.”

“An’ all of ’em loyal to us,” said Mr Sugden proudly. “See how they stand it! There’.* spirit for you—and no legal liability attackin'. They do this because they like it.”

The Pope congratulates Mr Sugden on the subtlety with which the evil effects of the strike are confined entirely to the working class. He calls it “a stroke of ■pure genius.”

Mr .Sugden is explaining that the world cannot get on without coal and democracy, when the “Old Man” enters and announces that the world has done away with the need of coal altogether by hat* nessing the tides.

(Mr Sugden is set to work stoking all the coal in Great Britain into the fur* naces of the nether regions.