LABOUR AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 277, 12 August 1918, Page 7

LABOUR AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES

THE .RECENT ARGUMENTS. The usual Sunday uijjlit meeting under the auspices ot the Social democratic Party was addressed last night by Mr. P. Eraser. In the course of hi's talk Mr. Fraser referred at soldo length to tho merits of the recent controversy that has been rmised us to whether Labour fares better under Catholic or Protestant dominanco in different countries. Mr. Eraser disagreed with Archbishop Redwood to tho extent that he did not admit that in the times before the Reformation tho workers of England were at all free- or happy, but ior this he did not blame tho Church. So, also, he disagreed with tho statements of the Rev. Howard Elliott to the contrary effect, pointing io some reactionary legislation-he mentioned the Statute of Labourers—which had been passed after tho information, and to the fact that with the development of the factory system in Protestant England the labour of women and children was practically forced, ami very ill-paid. But for this ho did not blame Protestantism. Lie declared that the cause of the oppression and of the uprisings that there had been against; it from tho days of Wat Tyler until to-day, i'n other countries us well as in England, was the system of capital ownership and its corrollary, "wage slavery." The chief point of Mr. Eraser's remarks was that it was not for the good of tho Labour movement that it should bo used as in a game of battledore and shuttlecock in any religious controversy.