THE COAL STRIKE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1702, 24 April 1917, Page 3

THE COAL STRIKE.

SOME PRESS CRITICISMS

Auckland Herald; —“It is scarcely believable that the majority of the miners concerned can derive any satisfaction from throwing great numbers of their fellow-work-ers out of employment, and causing needless distress and misery.

. . . . Grievances, if there are any, can be discussed, but on the question of the maintenance of the law there can he no compromise. It is far hotter that industry should suffer temporarily than that any section of workers should be able to bring Ibe community to its knees. Should the appeal to reason finally fail, free labour will be found and the miners themselves will be among the greatest sufferers. . . . The attitude of the Huntly miners, who have refused to lake part in the strike, suggests that a favourable result is regarded as probable, and that New Zealand may yet he saved from the ignominy of an internal industrial upheaval in the middle of a great war."

The Dominion: —“A small section of the community which objects to the law of the land passed by an overwhelming majority of the representatives of the people in Parliament lias decided to set the law at defiance. The miners say, in eff'eet, the people of New Zealand may elect, a Parliament, and the Parliament may pass laws for the common good or the common safety, hut unless we agree with those laws we shall not obey them. In defying Parliament and the law of the land, the miners are not defying the Government; they are defying the Stale —the people of New Zealand. . . The law is thus brought into contempt; order is trampled underfoot; and no man and no woman can turn to the forces of law and order for protection and safety. That is assuming that the law is permitted to be set at delianee. That yet remains to be seen. . . The country is face to face with a grave situation. It looks to those in authority to uphold the law aud safeguard the interests of the people at all costs. , . . Coining at a time like the present it is, apart from its crippling effect on the country's war efforts, a heartless and shameful attack on the personal welfare of practically every individual in the Dominion. Its effects will act and react in all directions; on employers and employees alike; farmers and business men, clerks and shop-girls, wharf labourers and factory hands. All must suffer directly or indirectly from the interference with manufacture, production, and transport. And all this loss and suffering, this crippling of our war efforts, which plays into the hands of the enemy and throws a heaviver harden than ever on our men in the fighting lines —nil this dislocation of the Dominion's life and activities is due to a few men refusing to recognise the rigid of Parliament to pass laws for the national safety. The miners did not strike because they had a labour grievance; they (lid not strike because they objected to working conditions or to rules of pay. They cannot claim the support of their fellow-workers in other branches of labour on (he ground that they were being unfairly treated by their employers. They have set the law at defiance, endangered their country so far as lies within their power, and threatened the whole of the people of the Dominion with inconvenience, hardship, and heavy financial losses because they disapprove of the steps taken by (lie representatives of the people in Parliament for the defence of the liberties which we all enjoy as citizens of the British Empire. It is of course, au intolerable position. An endeavour is now being made to bring home to the men on strike a sense of the obligation they owe to their country and to their countrymen. If it fails, those in authority must lake steps not only to enforce the law, but to open and to work the mines. The latter is a difficult but not an impossible task, and the Government will have the hacking and support of practically the whole of the people of the Dominion, for It is tin 1 people of the Dominion who are being made to suffer, and who have been set at delianee by the coal miners on strike."

Wellington Post : —“By open ballot the coal-miners on the West Coast — Brunner excepted have continued their .declaration of industrial war upon the Parliament and people of New Zealand. By virtue of a minority right they demand the repeal of the Military Service Act; and their alternative is to seize the Government and imperial services by the throat and to paralyse public and private activities by means of a deliberately created fuel famine. Believing themselves to be monopolists in the mining of coal, they are using their supposed advantage alter the fashion of the exploiter whom in other avenues they have so much decried; and. like true exploiters, they do not care how many innocent sufferers fall beneath the wheels of their .machine so long as they can drive through and accomplish their anti-

national purpose. Because Parliament will, not repeal compulsory military service—a thing that Abraham Lincoln ami the liberating North stood for, a thing that British and French Labour are standing for to-day —it is forthwith decreed by a coterie of colliery Napoleons that New Zealand shall receive no more coal; that, so far as the miners are concerned, the Imperial Navy and the troop transports may rust in dock while the enemy raids the high seas; and that all coal-using institutions, civil as well as military, including hospitals, and other places where suffering humanity cries for warmth, shall he starved and punished until the Legislature dues as the coal kings (new style) bid. These are the persons who talk of monopoly and tyranny, but where can be found a better instance than their own present exhibition of tyranny wielded by an irresponsible dictatorship? They denounce autocracy, but of all autocracies their own is the narrowest and most self-centred. They declaim against war, but in a country of adult suffrage they make war upon the people in order to coerce the people's Parliament. This is by no means the Jirst time that liberty has been wounded in (he house of its so-called friends; but seldom lias the treacherous blow been struck with such a show of unctions rectitude and such a parade of blatant hypocrisy. . . . There remains the question of remedies for the strike and punishment for the strikers. If the champions of this industrial and political imbecility are amenable to the industrial law, then the punitive machinery thereof should be fully applied. With regard to their attack on the Military Service Act. it is in the highest degree advisable that exemption from compulsory service should immediately be withdrawn from balloted men who refuse to work, their work being (he consideration for which they in the first place obtained conditional exemption. In such a crisis, and on such a principle, we cannot imagine that the Government will be lacking in firmness. Consequential and cumulative effects of the coal shortage wi! presently be felt by everybody, but if it educates the average citizen to the national danger and to the pernicious influence of disloyal agitators, the deprivation in the matter of fuel will not have been without its good effect. One of the points of vantage assumed by the monopolistic exploiters now on strike must by no means be taken for granted; we mean that the (lovernment should not concede, without thoroughly probing the question, (hat (he cocai-mines are unworkable except by the strikers. It may be dial (he skill of coal-miners is a somewhat exaggerated quality, and that substitute labour (led by skilled and partly skilled men) may be found in sufficient quantity to explode the monopolistic idea on which the political strikers base their tactics. Now that the issue is definitely joined, the Government must deliver its best blow just as much in this internal warfare as in the larger struggle outside 1 . In fact, it is very hard to dissociate the two sets of enemies, except by the circumstance that (lie one within the gate presents the more imminent and more insidious danger. The lime for parleying is past, and we believe that the people of New Zealand not only support a linn Governmental policy, Iml that m this crisis thev will tolerate no other.-"