SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTION

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 265, 3 August 1920, Page 5

SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTION

Sir,—Your journal has always stood for the interests of the common weal, and may I be permitted through your columns, to make a few remarks in regard to the industrial upheavals which aj'o convulsing the world to-day. If all our Labour leaders wero fighting for the removal of unjust and oppressive conditions and social ideals all would be well. Unfortunately there are a few who are bent upon establishing a state of society based upon communistic doctrines. The only remedy for this stato of affairs, -in my humble opiuion, is an "onliglitened democracy." I think, Sir, we are all suffering more or less from partial views, and we 6hall gain not by standing off and shrieking names at each other's partial views, but by striving in abrotherly and charitable spirit to combine them in some adequate synthesis. Elton Mayo, in "Demooracy and Freedom," sounds a note of warning to those electors whose aim is not tho good of society, but victory at tho polls, which Iwould strongly advise our Labour leaders and politicians to give attention to. Ho Bays: "A capacity for controlling political opinion by appeals to prejudices and suspicion has bccome tho solitary cquip--1 ment of tho politician. In- the vast majority o£ cases 'the candidate for election is politically aB uneducated- as tho masses whoso good-will ho courts. Ho seeks not to acquire political knowledge, but to develop a facility for arousing in his audiences by ovcry act of suggestion feelinw that will ensure their support for his candidature. ... To tho ignorant reform is always easy—and revolutionary Since ho knows nothing, ho is bound to begin by sweeping existing knowledge, with a magnificent gesture, into limbo. This is all too frequently the attitudo of tho democratic politician to social problems. "Elect mo,' he says, 'and I will doliver you from vour bonds of servitude.' Stirred by his easy rhetoric, tho community elects him, only to find ten years afterwards its bonds moro closely riveted than before." One of the sanest Labour leaders in tho. United States. Jas. P. Holland, president of the New York Sta'.o Federation of Labour, in answer to the proposals of tho York Council of Churches/ made a notablo appeal for the unity of all classes. . Ho said: "The hour has struck when differences that divorced Capital and Labour that bred hatred' of class against class should bo scourged from'all our hearts, and that 'peace on oai-tli and good-will among men should ceaso to bo a cant phrase, and become a visible reality."—l am, etc., JNO. W. HUSSEY. Smithfield, Wanganui.