Manawatu Herald. SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 1017. ANTI-COM PULSION STRIKERS V. PARLIAMENT AND PEOPLE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1701, 21 April 1917, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 1017. ANTI-COM PULSION STRIKERS V. PARLIAMENT AND PEOPLE.

THE Wellington Post soy* the hope that bet ter counsels will obtain among the coal-miners has Jed us to refrain from making a further indictment of the. anti-Parlia-ment strike, nor do we intend to do so now at any length, since the final word in the Ministerial negotiations has not been spoken. At this stage it is not necessary to condemn —as we have frequently done —the uneconomics and unnationalism of restriction of output, and the unpatriotism of striking in order to snatch from the Government’s hands an essential war-weapon. We believe that the position has now been presented to the coal-miners with the utmost thoroughness; the time for pleading is past, and the time has come for the coal-miners

as responsible New Zealanders to make their choice, and to take the consequences. But to the public, at large there is still something to be said. It is very important that, the people as a whole should recognise Chat the strike against the Military Service Act is not only directed at their Government and their Parliament, but at themselves. This impudent minority demand that Parliament should hamstring the country’s defencesI—under 1 —under threat of a fuel famine —is a blow at the people’s right of self-government, and particularly at their collective right of self-defence; and those persons who cannot mentally figure out (hat a great constitutional principle —and in fact the whole question of national existence —is involved, may, if common-sense does not prevail, be able to physically feel in the course of a few days the immediate consequences of the industrial civil war which the Ministerial delegation is still endeavouring to avoid. If he is forced to walk for lack of train or tramcar, and if he finds that he cannot ship Ids goods for want of coal, the ordinary citizen will take notice. Such deprivations the average New Zealander will cheerfully bear because of the war, but will if not be a shame and a disgrace if the publicare penalised, and essential industries crippled, because the leaders of a section engaged in coal-mining yish to point a pistol at the head of Parliament? That is what the latest Red Flag movement amounts io; and the people who see it, and those who do not yet see it but may feel it, should direct to the subject some hal’d thinking. The issue is anti-compulsion strikes v. the Parliament and the people of Now Zc land. There can be only one answer.