Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 1921. “RED" PLOT AGAINST THE EMPIRE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2320, 25 August 1921, Page 2

Manawatu Herald THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 1921. “RED" PLOT AGAINST THE EMPIRE.

THE Lord Chancellor (Lord Birkenhead), at the World Cotton Conference in London recently, speaking of the pervasive grounds of anxiety, which, rising as from a plague spot in Russia, had spread over the whole civilised world, and of the elaborate organisation and the skilful manipulation of propaganda, which had been the instrument by which desperate, and able men had attempted to pull down and destroy the whole edifice of our civilisation: “This propaganda has been very specially directed tit the British Empire. It is very credibly reported that for a long period those who conceived jgnd controlled this movement saw at once the theatre of its greatest opportunity, and, it might be, of its ultimate, coasted, spectacular triumph, in the British Empire. The most subtle form of propaganda, amply reinforced by liberal financial subvention, has been at work here and throughout the Empire, to divert the minds- of British Labour from constitutional methods of progress to the doctrine whose full consequences are to be seen in Russia. This conspiracy, wickedly conceived and unscrupulously carried out, has failed. The selected, intercepted documents have made it plain that those who conceived it, and their dupes and creatures in this country—a fringe of wild men —planned to take advantage of what was hoped would be a general strike when the miners came out, and it was hoped that the traditional common-sense, sanity, and sobriety of the British working people would be dissipated and would react into violeut courses.”