BRAINS CHEAP.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 February 1920, Page 4

BRAINS CHEAP.

The statement made in the House by Captain Elliot to the effect that the payment for muscle is so much higher than the present-day condition into which England has fallen (writes a correspondent in a London paper.)

To-day thousands of men—educated and polished—are without employment, and are reduced to a state bordering on pauperism. Surely this is not a fitting reward .for the parents who educated them with the best of their means so that they should be well equipped for the battle of Life.

Miners earn as much as £lO per week—they deserve it—but the matriculated “demobbed” subaltern has held out to him, if he is lucky, the extremely suitable position of being a clerk with a munificent salary of £2 15s per week. Our University workers are miserably paid, some of the highest only receiving £6OO per annum, and thinking themselves lucky. Our clergy are many of them bordering on poverty, and lnany thousands of our sedentary workers “exist” and rear families on surprisingly small incomes.

“Docs it pay to be educated, and shall I not do better to sacrifice' my position and work with my hands” is the question that many young men are now asking themselves, and, looking at matters from a financial point of view, they would be well-advised to follow such an occupation. Yet, when such men apply for a navvy’s job they are accused of taking the bread from the worker’s mouth, or arc patted on the back by a. kind-heart-ed manager, who tells them that it’s not quite the thing for them, whilst, if they do work thus, the world of respectability draws its cloak of ‘solf-respcet about it and cuts them off with a sigh. England must acknowledge brains as well as muscle, or else we shall degenerate into a nation of automatons, leaving the power of thinking to lie piac tised by others.