A VERSATILE "PROFESSOR,"

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14831, 24 November 1913, Page 8

A VERSATILE "PROFESSOR,"

MB MILLS THEN AND NOW.

Last year Mr W. T. Mills was organiser for the- "Evolutionaries." This year he is an organiser for the "Revolutionaries," or "direct actionists." On November 17th last year he spoke at the Wellington Opera House on "The Labour Movement in America," with special reference to Waihi. The "Post" report states:—

After illustrating the situation by thq story of continual failure by the strike federations—the "Knights of Labour," tho American Railway League, and the Industrial Workers of the World in America—the speaker said that the Labour movement had been asked to pledge its existence to tho battle in Waihi. The policy of the enemies of Labour had been to tie together the whole of Labour in connexion with tho policy adopted at Waihi—put them all in one sack and sink it. If the United Labour Party, if tho District Councils, if the different Labour organisations had dropped into that trap, there would have been no Labour movement in New Zealand today.

To-day the Red Fedcrationiste, not the employers, are inviting all unionists to walk into such a "trap" as Mr Mills discussed last year—the pitfall of the general strike. Scores of cases might be quoted in which the "Professor" utterly condemned the Red Feds, and their policy and methods. A very striking case is recalled by a Wellington paper. -•■ He gave an address in the Opera House on Juno 23rd, 1912, on "The Lessons of the Waihi Strike." He remarked that "the executive of the United Labour. Party had considered the strike, and had definitely decided that it would speak no word and take no eidcs upon it at all. His party had been bitterly denounced for refusing to enter into something which was absolutely opposed to everything for which it stood. Hβ had always been opposed to the doctrine of etriking often and striking hard, for he believed that the time had come when the strike was out of place in a rational, civilised community- (Loud applause.) .. . - Those in New Zealand who had adopted methods of violence declared they had to do so because the Arbitration Court had broken down, but whose fault was it if this was the fact? The workers were far more numerous than the capitalists, and they would have no need to strike anywhere if they would y only strike at the ballot-box. If the Court was not right, they mnst make it right; if the law was not what it ought to be, they must make it as it ought to .be. It was in the hands of the workers .themselves to.right the law and organise the Court just in the way they wanted."

Mr Milk is now an organiser of the Red Federation.

In the book about tho Waihi strike, which was issued by the Federation of Labour, there are many sharp references to Mr Mills, who was then anathema to the Eed Feds. Some of his writings against the Federation are quoted in chapter fifteen. Following is a typical extract from his writings at that tune. Under tho heading, "Tho 1.W.W.," he wrote:— "Arbit.-ation was repudiated, and the tactics of the American I.W.W. < movement even then discredited in its own country, wero imported bodily into Now Zealand with the effort to settle all trada controversies with the weapon of the stiike, to give the authority to striko to any group of n.en at <«ny time employed oa any . kind of a job, and the row, once having been started from anywhere, by anybody nnd for any cause, all other workers must 'down tools' until the oiigiual striker> should be permitted to have their in controlling the matters about which the row was started in the first place." Mr Mills also stated* that he had been invited to join the Federation on arriving in New Zealand, but declined. He.described its policy accurately, and said of tho Federation, in a headline, that it had "a bad record and a foul programme." Giving "the pith" of the Waihi strike, the "Professor" said on October 17th: "Under the pretence of maintaining tho solidarity of Labour, the Waihi striko was ordered by the men on the ground not against the employer, but against a trade union, not because the employers were concerned in it, but because it proposed to register and to act through the Arbitration Court."