STRAY THOUGHTS.

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 6, 1 July 1913, Page 4

STRAY THOUGHTS.

A human sacrifice on the altar of dividends; inscribed on the headstone over the grave of a vie-' tim of the Mt. Lyell holocaust by a sorrowing and devoted mother. The Queenstown Municipal ghouls had the inscription removed, as it was held to be offensive and untrue in substance and fact by unprejudiced people. Offensive to whom? Offensive only to the ghoulish capitalist class that live on robbery and plunder day by day. The bereaved mother journeyed specially from Launceston and replaced the epitaph writing on a tablet, and placed it under a glass enclosing a wreath. She has with sublime courage issued a public warning against interference with the grave of her son. Words contained in that epitaph burn into the brains of intelligent observers. Truth is dreaded by the hellhounds of capitalism. The inscription in dispute is an everlasting condemnation of the system; dividends are placed before human lives. The Queensto'wn Councillors are guilty of an infamous, damnable desecration of a grave, the last resting-place of a devoted son, mourned by a sorrowing and grief-stricken mother. For the action she has taken Mrs. St. Clair Stone will be enshrined for ever in the hearts of all thoughtful workers. An epitaph of Truth wholesome to read by the thoughtful passer-by; an antidote to the sickening, morbid, nauseous, hypocritical, silly inanities one reads on the average headstone in any cemetery. Solid scientific truth is hateful the capitalist;,he dreads intelligence in the awakening mass of humanity. Capitalism demands its human sacrifices on the altar of dividends daily, not in twos and threes, but in whole battalions. Not alone the wholesale slaughter in the mines and industrial hells, but in the filthy slums where the workers are compelled to exist. Human sacrifices everywhere—the worker in the throes of consumption, women and children in filthy hovels suffering from lack of food, the boy dragged from school at an age when he could best assimilate necessary education and hurled into the factory hell; the girl, in all the innocence of her childhood and in the glow and beauty of youth, ruthlessly plucked from the shelter of home and hurled out on the cold capitalist world’s broad highway, where innocence, mercy, truth, kindness, and purity is crushed out of the hearts of all, to