The Dominion. TUESDAY, JULY 22, 1913. MR. M'LAREN'S POLITICAL PLIGHT.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1808, 22 July 1913, Page 4

The Dominion. TUESDAY, JULY 22, 1913. MR. M'LAREN'S POLITICAL PLIGHT.

A newspaper duel which has been going on between Me. M'Laren and Mr. Tregear- as to the methodß and objects of the Federation of Labour and the United Labour Party is interesting from several points of view. On the whole, Mr. Tregear haß had the best of the encounter. His attitude certainly appears to be more disinterested than that of the United Labour Party leaders who seceded from the main body as soon as it became evident that the trend of events at the conference did not fall in with their political ambitions. They took part in the conference apparently in the hope of directing the movement in such a manner as to make it useful to some of their number a-a a stepping-stone to Parliament. The Red Fedcrationists, however, were keen enough to seo through this manoeuvre, and declined to follow at the heels of this particular little clique, including rejected politicians dnd political aspirants of the paid trades union secretary variety, who really could not be regarded by any stretch of the imagination as genuine "working men." Mr. Tregear, no doubt, had such men as these in his mind when he wrote that it appeared to him as he got older that "if every man carried his public and his private interests in a basket, in most cases when the private interests are taken out there is not much left in the basket." Labour has learned the truth of Mr. Tregear's words by long experience, and has become suspicious of the _ genuineness of the fulsome flatteries of a class of politicians whose real object is to climb over the backs of the working classes into the House of Representatives. Mr. M'Laren and some of his friends are now angry because the recent conference and the subsequent split disclosed the emptiness of their 'baskets," and it lias also enormously lessened their chances of a Parliamentary career. They now find themselves somewhat out in the cold, or at least thinly supported, owing to the decision of the main body of organised labour, as represented by the Unity _ Congress, to form a distinct political party of their own. The Federationists, at any rate, have the courage to stand as out-and-out Labour-Socialists, and have definite ideas a-s to tho best methods of gaining their ends. The United Labour Party and its leaders have fallen between two stools in their endeavour to reconcile the interests of the remnant of "Liberalism" with the aims and aspirations of the mass of the organised labour unions. The genuine Labour-Social-ist recognises that he has nothing to gain from alliance with the futile and disorganised band of politicians who now form the Opposition party in Parliament. It has become altoeether too palpable that tho antiReformers simply want to use Labour for their own purposes, as they have done in the past, and this accounts for the fact that their overtures for combined action have been so decisively and scornfully rejected. This rejection involves the downfall of Mr. M'Larf.n and his friends, who acted as tho go-betweens of the two sections, and it also means tho ultimate extinction of tho present Opposition, whose place in tho political world is destined to be divided between the Reform party, with its progressive programme, on sane and moderate lines, and a powerful Labour party, with its platform of straight-out revolutionary SooiaJism,