SYNDICALISM AND THE SOLDIER.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1434, 8 May 1912, Page 6

SYNDICALISM AND THE SOLDIER.

It will be remembered that at the end of March the printers and publishers of The Syndicalist were sentenced to terms of imprisonment for issuing seditious appeals to his Majesty's soldiers in connection with the coal strike. The offence consisted. in the printing, as an article in The Syndicalist, and subsequently as a pamphlet for circulation amongst the forces, of an appeal for the defiance of military duties. Tho article was a plain incitement to mutiny. "Men, comrades, brothers,'' the article began, "you # are in the Army, so are we—you in an army of destruction, we in the industrial or army of construction. . . .

AVhen we go on strike to better our lot, which is the lot also of your fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, you are called upon by your officers to murder us. Don't do it.

. . . 'Thou shalfc not kill,' 'says the Book. It does not say—unless you have a uniform on. . . . Act the man ! Act the brother ! Act the human being! Property can be replaced ! Human life never! . . . Don't disgrace your parents, your class, by being willing tools of the master class. You, like us, are of the slave class," and so 011—a clear incitement to the soldiers to disobey their superiors, and to mutiny in the interests of ft wild political doetrinc. The jury found that the defendants had endeavoured to seduce soldiers, and the Judge sentenced the defendants to six and nine months' imprisonment. The Radical pi'ess, as might have been expected, took up the case with venomous pens, The Radicals in the House of Commons exploded in a scries of violent questions.

The turmoil quickly settled round the point of difference between the friends of soci;il order and tho enemies of the maintenance of social order by the only means of maintenance. The Unionist press as a whole, supported the Government in its defence of the punishment of Syndicalist sedition, but the Liberal press was divided. The Radical wing took up exactly the .position that is occupied by the opponents of our own Defence, people who say that defence, involving as it docs the prospective killing of human beings, is a crime against something that they fancy is the brotherhood of man. _ Tne Daily Sews, for example—which iB being forced, like some of the "Liberal journals in this country, into tho acceptance of an extreme Eadical diet as the alternative to mental starvation —violently condemned the sentences passed upon the seditionmongers, and ridiculed the fact—for it is a fact —that "the security of our social structure rests finally upon the support of the British soldiers.''' If .it does not soldiers and policemen should be abolished. Fortunately (hero is evidence that the best Liberal opinion in Great Britain is against the rule of lawlessness. The H'eslminstrr Gazette, for example, commented severely upon a resolution by the Fabian Society in which it was pretended that the Sixth Commandment had been repealed. But the Sixth Commandment (it said) is. mi l "Thou shali not kill thy fi-How-cnuiitiyiiiaii." but "Thou shall not. kill." It i< idle, therefore, to rely 011 this Commandment unless you are prepared to >ay that ft soldier ought never to kill anybodv. Pome of our most respected citizens do "SHv (hat, but the.v do not givo effect to limit: views by itppmliltK to egldiors.

Jr. New Zealand there arc some people,.appealing lo our young men to regard national delcnec as murder in ymw, and crying them on to disobey the law. They are not likely to succeed in their purpose, hut tliev mav do a Rood deal of harm ail .the same in weakening the respect for law and order on which the" well-being of society depends.