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Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16153, 6 March 1918, Page 6

In the new Bill which the Government nf New South Wales ho;:es will load to more peaceful conditions in industry in that State, there are some drastic restrictions upon the freedom of print during strikes. I n the orig : nal Bill it was proposed to make it an offence, punishable by lines up to £500, for any newspaper to publish matter of any kind onoouraging, advising, aiding, or abetting an illegal strike. Without destroying the general effect of the clause, the Government agreed to modify it, but it is .surely surprising that anyone should object to the punishment of a newspaper assisting any illegal action. Soma of the Caucus members spoke very strongly of "the liberty of the Press" ; the clause, they said, was ''diabolical,'" since '-it aimed directly at the Labour Press, and left no means of communication for the workers themselves." The Minister in charge of the Bill explained, however, that no restrictions were placed upon the assistance of a strike which was not an illegal one. To our mind the prohibition against newspaper encouragement of illogal strikes is quite sensible. It is far more important for organised Labour that the law shall be upheld than that any strike should succeed. Moreover, since such strikes as are now generally recognised to be so soriously hostile to the national interest as to bo deemed illegal cannot evor succced, the people who oncourage such disorders aro really enemies of the workers concerned.

Good Australians must have been perturbed last week wlion they road a cable message reporting an interesting incident at a conferenco of school trustees and teachers held at Regina, i n tho Canadian province of Saskatchewan.- At this conference, which decided to abolthe use of German, Hungarian, or other enomy languages in the schools of the province,' a Mennonite priest pleaded for the use of French in the schools, and lie supported his plea with an argument from Australia. Australia, he said, was an example of a country having only, one language, but it had

failed in patriotism, while Bslgium, a country with two languages (French and Flemish) had shown the highest patriotism. The othor delegates, it appears, gave checrs for Australia, and the Mennonite trustee withdrew his criticism and apologised. This withdrawal and apology doubtless ploased the Australian public, but they must have felc , a little uneasy concerning the criticism, , which shows that tho result of the referendum lias not helped reputation in other countries. Tho Australian papers would hardly have noticed the 3lennonit© truster's argument if Australia had not boon cited in it. If the trustee meant that the failure of uni-lingual Australia proves the potency of mixed languages in promoting j patriotism, he was talking nonsonse. But one Australian paper misunderstood him. It assumed that he mc-ant that tho most patriotic nation is that in which the average citizen speaks two languages, but that would be wilder nonsense stiil. So far as wo may draw a conclusion from modern experience, tho fact is that unity in language is much more likely to make for patriotism than is a babol of t;ngues. The handicap of C'annda is the existence, separate and largely hostile to each other, of an Englishspeaking and a French-speaking people. This dualism is a bar to national unity in Canada, and tho same is truo of Africa.