COST OF LIVING, AND GENERAL UNREST.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 480, 6 July 1912, Page 7

COST OF LIVING, AND GENERAL UNREST.

To the Editor. Sir,—ln my previous letter, which appeared in your last Saturday's issue, averred that education was at the bottom of the whole unrest in this Dominion. Now, with your permission I will point out a few of the numberless causes leading up to the present unrest now prevailing, and after mature thought I am forced to the conclueion that we are barely on the fringe of the great upheaval of society that has for centuries past triumphed righteousness (in its broadest sense) underfoot and the humbler classes into dust. I shall refer to this further on. In the meantime, I must refer to your readers to a letter that appeared in one of*the public papers under the signature uf Sir Robert Stout, in which he makes very clear that if we go two or three decades back in our history, we find that the cost of living (living per se) was even more then than at the present time, and except that I think he rather over, than under, estimated the wages paid for unskilled labour,-I heartily endorse all his other estimates. Coming back to the late commission. It is to be regretted that the cause of this great unrest was not within the scope of their enquiries for we are, most assuredly, a unit in this great curse that has been thrust upon us. A 1 though we have not so many factors leading up to the cause, we, nevertheless, feel the effects. We must go back to the Mother Land and look down the dim vista of past ages, and there we v* ill find that the cause of unrest is, inter alia: firstly, the iniquitous laws that allow immense aggregations of capital to combine to crush down individual effort, and dictate to the world, the prices that the general public shall pay for the I food they eat, and the cloth they wear. This is what we find in the present day. We must go back sixty years or thereabouts, when railways and other progressive meaures were in their infancies, many of the erstwhile well-to-do people who invested all their capital in the various schemes then in vogue, poon found themselves in the debtors' prisons, and their families starving. This stat9 of things culminated in the Limited Liability Act being placed on the English Statute Book, which at that tirae was looked upon as, more or less, a benign Act. 1 Now, these benign Acts have allowed immense aggregations of capital to dominate th 9 whole system of commerce, and even retailers, and completely dragging through the mud and mire, what was once honest trade. The nexc in order are t,he numerous unions permeating the whole civilised world. This shows the far-sightedness of the poet Shakespeare when 'he points out "What great thines from little things aarie " as the followinwg will show, viz: the first union emanated from a simple and honest farm labourer, compeers some 60 years back\ were, perhaps, the most numerous and downtrodden of the then working classes in England. He did all he could, and succeded in checking the more militant chartists so much in evidence at the time, and was the first labour member elected to the English House of Commons, other causes, or important factors of unrest in the next. —I am, etc., OLD SETTLER.