BARBARIC METHODS.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1897, 4 November 1913, Page 6

BARBARIC METHODS.

"To me the strike in its origin, in its conduct, unci in tho wild barbaric utterances of its leaders, is nothing short of appalling." These are not the words of some indignant employer or old-fashioned Tory, but of one who speaks from the standpoint of an advocate of the cause of Labour, Mil. li. D. Bedford, Lecturer on Political Economy in .Otago University. Mr. Bedford is a wellknown social reformer, and at one time occupied a seat in Parliament", being one of a littlo group of advanced Radicals which included the late Mil. T. E. Taylor, of Christchurch. Mr. Bedford is only voicing tho views of the best class of labour leaders throughout the world when he declares that "there is no salvation along the line of broken agreements," and every sober-minded man who wants to see a progressive improvement in the condition of the manual workers will agree with his assertion that "tho attainment of the great ideal of economic readjustment is only hindered by that alienation of public- , sympathy which springs from spurned covenants and flamboyant defiances of law and in-citements-to incendiarism and plunder." It is tho duty of every working man who wishes to better his own lot and those of his fellows to dissociate himself from the' revolutionary methods which sire being advocated by a certain type of agitator in New Zealand at the present time. That way ruin lies. It has always failed to help the worker, and always .must fail. Those who have really studied the labour problem from the sympathetic point of view know well that- the honest working man has everything to lose and nothing to gain by syndicalism, violenco, and the disorganisation of industry, It is sheer folly to believe that a class war is the way to an earthly paradiso. Tho more thoughtful section of the workers know this by bitter experience, and those who arc now being influenced by the anti-social. rhetoric of revolutionary demagogues will in timo. learn the same, lesson. When they corno to their senses and realise how they have been duped by reckless and incompetent guides they will begin to see that reason and conciliation aremuch more effective instruments than brute force. The weapon of the strike, as Mr. Bedford states, should only be used when every other resource has failed. Mr. Bedford's timely and straightforward 'utterance deserves to be very carefully pondered by working men throughout the Dominion, especially those who are fingering "the futile weapons of the French Revolution."