NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 96, 17 January 1921, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY

That the dispute at the Blackball mine provides not r he slightest justification for a national hold-up in the mining industry is made doubly clear by the report of the Under-Secretary for Mines. A miner swore at a mine deputy and was dismissed, but alleges that he spoke under provocation, declaring that the deputy fiist swore- at him. Tho Under-Secretary says he finds it impossible to come to a definite conclusion as to the side on which the blame lies. He points out that it is an offence against the law for a miner to use threatening or abusive language to a mine official, also vice versa for a mine official to use it to a miner. Neither pagty in this case —which is to be made the ground for a Dorn in ion-wide dislocation of industry—has thought it worth while to proceed with the obvious remedy of a prosecution in a Magistrate’s Court. The miner, moreover, is still working at the mine as a check weighman, his wages for this work being paid by the union. Mr. Arbuckle asked for the Undcr-Secretary’s report to clinch the matter. The report being published fhe public finds the whole conflict to be a twopenny halfpenny storm in a teacup that with any tact and forbearance would have been settled directly between the local union and the mine management, or failing agreement should have Iwen referred to a magistrate under the bad language clauses of the Mines Acts. Until that is done nobody can know whether the miner or the mine deputy was to blame, but everybody can see that the Miners’ Federation is putting itself hopelessly in the wrong.

The crisis that has occurred between the Storey Administration and the executive of the Australian - Labour Party is a mild example Of what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is likely to mean. Mr. Storey is Premier of New South Wales as the result: of a general election at which everyone, man and woman, over twenty-one years of age and not in a gaol or a lunatic asylum, had a vote. The election was hpld under a system of proportional representation framed in the hope of ensuring that the Parliament elected should most accurately reflect the wishes and desires of the sovereign people. That is Mr. Storey’s mandate to act. But whatl is the position in. which he finds himself? He is a Labour Party man, and he and all associated with him are pledged to obey the behests of the Labour Party executive, which holds their resignations written before election, and can turn the whole lot of them into the street if it chooses. Mr. Storey proposes to go to England in an effort; to borrow moneyThe Labour Party executive has other views, and seems to have been giving this unfortunate Premier summary orders on a number of subjects. Mr. Storey is there at the call of the people of New South Wales. The Labour Party executive is a group of private individuals quite outside Parliament, )iot elected on adult suffrage, proportional representation, or responsible to the public % any way.. Yeti it, is it which calls the tune,, and the Labour Premier’ is merely a marionette who dances as the strings are pulled. Parliament in such circumstances becomes a farce and responsible government a make-believe;

Reforence in to-day's messages to Herr Stinnes and his sixty newspapers is a reminder that this representative of big business is to-day probably the most powerful individual in Germany. Under the cover of political and industrial unrest Hugo Stinnes has been steadily consolidating his interests. Herr Ballin. the biggest figure in commercial Germany in pre-war days, blew out his brains when the armistice was signed and the Kaiser ran away. Stinnes has had other uses for his. He began in quite a small way in the coal-mining industry, and rose to be its dominant influence. Then he bought the big Rhenish-Westphalian electric w.orka which used the product of his coal mines; after that he went into the edectro-metallurgical manufactory with two big acquisitions. A'n investment in oil distilling from coal led on to interest in motor constructtoiv.*anu shipping, and he became part-owner of the Lob motor works, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the Woermann Line, and the East Africa Line. All these various interests Herr Stinnes has been consolidating since tbs war at an extraordinary pace by buying up companies here, there, and everywhere. To sweeten public opinion no has purchased newspapers by 'the score, and his crowning achievement in this direction was the purchase of the "Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung,” formerly the "Norddeutsche Allegemeine Zeitung,” until recently the official organ of the German Government. In addition to the papers he owns, Herr Stinnes has a big grip on the supplies on which al! the other German newspapers depend. Lord Northcliffe’s power is a mere circumstance to that of this German Rockefeller.

The statement, that there la a great anti-Bolshevik movement in Riis, sia is not one on which it is wise Io place too much reliance. . At the best of times it has been difficult enough to know what is happening in that vast country with scanty newspapers and poor communications. Under present circumstances it is well-nigh impossible. Russians cannot go on a train without per. mils—an English visitor to change n pound into roubles (for which ho gets 10,000 to-day in place of 10 before the war) has to arm himself with certificates and documents and spend the best part of a morning in argument. If we can know little of Russia the Russians are in even worse case as to what is taking place in tho outside world. It is an offence for an ordinary citizen to possess a foreign newspaper, and Dr. Haden Guest, secretary of the Britisli labour delegation, records that he was asked whether life had changed as much in London as in Petrograd, which has shrunk from 2} millions to three-quarters of a million;

where there is practically no horse traffic in the streets, many of which are grass-gown; where the motor traffic amounts to half a dozen official cars; where shops are boarued up, and where the people on the sidewalks are wan and shabby. “What has happened to Buckingham Palace?” the Russians asked Dr. Guest, and was it really true that a Communist revolution had already succeeded in England? Dr. Guest apparently does not think the Leninist minority arq likely to Impose their will overlong on the mighty' forces at work in Russia. Whether Leninism is collapsing now or not, this is a season of the year of which Lenin will doubtless be glad to see the end. It was “General Ferrier ’’ that once before was fatal to a bigger man in Russia.

To discredit Mr. Harding in his contest for the Presidency of tho United States an extraordinary story was put into circulation that some of his ancestors a hundred years ago showed traces of coloured blood. Tho whole story seems to have had no foundation in fact, but it was perseveringly circulated in America by a Mr. Chancellor, described as “an educator of some prominence.” In any other country probably not a vote could have been influenced by such digging into the rag box of the past. In the United States, however, every person with a shade of colour more than onesixteenth is considered a negro. One of the most prominent leadens of tho tant American negro party, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, would pass in Europe for a. Frenchman or a polished German Jew. He is as unlike a negro as Prospero is unlike Caliban. Yet in America ho and some three million more mulattoes are lumped in under the “Jim. Crow” laws, which oblige negroes to sit in the rear portion of tramcars and to submit to many indignities. According to Mr. Stephen Graham in the “Nineteenth Century and After,” it is from these mulattoes that the militant negro movement comes—not from the easy-going fullblooded negroes, but from tho white soul looking out of the eyes of a black man and hating with an intense eternal hate the humiliation which tho white world puts on him.