Dear Sir,

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 43, 22 April 1942, Page 4

Dear Sir,

Letters to the Editor must be clearly written on one side of the paper only and where a nom-de-plume is used the name of the writer nm£t be included for reference purposes. The Editor reserves the tight to abridge, •amend or withhold any letter or letters. equality OF SACRIFICE Sir, There is much in Mr Evans' letters that is interesting ancl informative if your readers wish to learn something about things as they really are. But do they? Probably not iii many cases. People hate learning or thinking, that is why we cannot' get even half a dozen people together in Whakatane for a W,E.A. class. It is so much easier to shut your eyes and open jour mouth and take what the Press, will give And they give it to us alright, days a week, year in and year out at 2d a time l viz., what shunks the watersiders are, the freezing works hands, the coal miners, all wage earners in fact. Always striking just for spite, going without their wages and getting into all sorts of trouble just to be nasty; and the real causes of the strikes, such as the attempt to force the Westfield cannery girls to tin rotten meat for the soldiers at the end of last year, is always carefully kept in the background. These tales about fabulous earnings by common working men appear in the press periodically, but somehow we don't hear about the firms with war contracts whose tax free dividends and reserves have been doubled since the war began. Now most of you won't believe that, I will bet long odds that you won't take the trouble to find cut that it is true either. I: believe that our Eiditor put out that story about the £3 .a day carpenter (n good faith, but I fear someone has been doing some leg pulling, may quite possibly have been paid to do it. Don't be horrified at that suggestion. Wlien twenty or so of the nobs in Australia have, had to be arrested for their fifth column, work in the Australia First Movement a little job like this to disrupt the common people by putting the soldiers against the carpenters would be a sort of day's good deed. 1 Mr H. G, Wells ha? stated that, he 1 was a stalking hcrSe for the capital- ; /sts in the last war but that there 5 is nothing doing this time, and I sincerely hope that our honest Edi r 1 tor who courageously prints scath- ; (ng criticisms of himself will not ' be led into this miserable "divide ' and rule" scheme of setting the soldier against the carpenter, the farmer against the wliarfie etc. for the benefit of the profiteer. He is the real enemy of all, Avith the exception of the Axis Powers of course. By tax free dividends I mean the 1 dividends as paid to the shareholder from which all taxes have been al--1 ready deducted before release. Yours etc., WORKING FARMER-