The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 1906 OLD AGE PENSIONS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 12, 22 March 1906, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 1906 OLD AGE PENSIONS

To promote the cause of Beligion and Justice by the ways of Truth and Pence. Leo. XIII. to the N Z. Tablet

In no country has labor been more deeply wronged than in England ; in no country is it entitled to demand a heavier reparation. The days of its degradation and impoverishment began — as it began in Germany —with the Reformation. In one of his lectures, Professor Tiiorol'd, Rogers (the great authority on latfor problems in history) points out the successive steps by which the beggary and ruin of the British worker was accomplished : by the extravagance of Henry VIII. and his dissolution of the monasteries ; by the confiscation of the trades 1 unions' lands, the issue of a debased coinage, and the re-introduction and legalisation of slavery under Edward Vl.'; and by the savage repressive legislation of Elizabeth's days, which made England a physical hell-of-the-damned to the working man from the time of the ' Virgin Queen ' till the nineteenth century) had almost reached its meridian. We have more than once traced the story of the grinding degradation of labor in Great Britain from the evil days of ' the great Eliza ' till close up to the year of. grace 1850. It is a heart-riving story. Almost at the close oi the first half of the * century of light and progress,' Eng'el compressed the bulky volumes of official reports (1833-1812) into a tabloid story of ' children and young people) in factories overworked and beaten as if they were slaves ; of diseases and distortions only found in manufacturing districts ; of filthy, wretched houses where people huddle together like wild beasts. We hear,' he adds — still compressing the Blue-Books and Reports — 'of girls and women working underground in the dark recesses of the coal-mines, dragging loads of coal ,in cdrs, in places where no horses could go, and harnessed and crawling along the subterranean pathways like beasts of burden. Everywhere we find cruelty and oppression, and in many cases the workmen were but slaves bound to fulfil their master's commands under fear of dismissal and starvation. Freedom they had in name — freedom to starve and die ; but not freedom to speak, still less 'to act, as citizens of a free State.' ' In fact,' says Gibtyins in his ' Industrial History of England,' •' the material condition of the working clas&es of England was at this time in the lowest depths of po\erty and degradation.'

The Reform Act, the growth of trades' unions, the Chartist movement, all contributed to win baclc for the British worker sundry, igrudging instalments of the rightsi that Kvero theirs as a matter of course in the days when England was at the same time Catholic and ' Merrie England.' (Buti at this moment no great industrial country probably lags behind the van of humanitarian factory and labor legislation as does Great Britain. In no civilised country is pauperism (that dread heritage of the Reformation) so widespread an evil and so grave a problem. And there have been very few periods, if any, during the past fifty years when distress among the workers was so acute and general, and when the problem of the unemployed commanded to such a menacing extent the attention of the public. ' The, wealth of a nation is not,' says an authority on political economy, ' to be measured by the amount of riches in the hands of a few, but by the degree of prosperity generally diffused throughout the population.' Hunger and cold and starving children must have been a terrible logic in the angry brains of the ten thousand workers that recently paraded the principal streets of London, singing the ' Marseillaise ' and demanding work — not the pauper's dole. The New York ' Freeman ' aptly translates the grim cry of anguish of this sodden mass of humanity in Swinburne's lines :—: — ' Ye whose meat is sweet And your wine-cup red, Us beneath your feet Hunger grinds as wheat, Grinds to make you bread. 1 Ye whose night is bright With soft rest and heat, Clothed like day with light, Us the naked night Slays from street to street.'

For generations class legislation in England has been steadily sharpening the contrast between the House of Have and the House of W T ant (as Henry George calls them). Boyle O'Reilly thus sounds the note of warning as to its possible results :—: — ' Beware with your Classes ! Men are men, and a cry in the night is a fearful teacher ; When it reaches the heart of the masses, then they needj but a sword for a judge and preacher. • Take heed, for ' your Juggernaut pushes hard ; God holds the doom that its day completes ; It will dawn like a fire when the track is barred by a barricade in the city streets.' It is easy for Parliament to pass academic resolutions,; and for Ministers to talk unctuous platitudes about ' prudence ' and ' patience ' ; but in the meantime the workers in the street and their childien in the rookeries of the big cities are starving. With the lead given by New Zealand and Australia and Switzerland and Holland and Germany, we hope that the British Parliament will go, and go speedily, beyond the mere affirmation of principles. A Parliament that spent £250,000,000 in money (plus thousands of useful lives)' to| increase the fat dividends of a coterie of mostly foreign mining magnates on the Rand, might reasonably be\ pected to invest a small fraction of that sum to mend and end a condition of things that is a standing reproach to Britain.