G. K. Chesterton's Views on Arbitration

Maoriland Worker, Volume 3, Issue 92, 20 December 1912, Page 4

G. K. Chesterton's Views on Arbitration

PHILIP SNOWDEN ANSWERED.

Mr. G. K. Chesterton, whose amusing and often trenchant observations on current affairs are a welcome feature of the pages of the London "Daily News and Leader," has fallen foul of Mr. Philip Snowden, M.P., because that gentleman has been telling the workers of Britain that an arbitration law will do more for them than strikes. Mr. Chesterton gravely identifies himself with the workers, and proceeds to protest that Mr. Snowden is "asking us to be slaves even before we have become Moslems. He is asking us to give up the right to strike, or in other words the right to refuse a job when it is offered on unjust terms." Mr. Chesterton admits with Mr. Snowden that strikes have not succeeded in helping the workers, but he challenges Mr. Snowden to prove that the workers have ever succeeded in improving their position through arbitration. However little the men have got out of strikes, he asserts, they could not well have got less out of State intervention, for the perfectly simple reason that the British State is a plutocratic State and its rulers always see that plutocrats predominate in every judicial body. The real reason for the failure of British strikes, Mr. Chesterton considers, has been the intervention of tho State. "The railway strike," he says, "did not fail at all. It was stopped by a political compromise, the offer of the Commission; and from that Commission the strikers have not got the value of a brass button." Air. Snowden, he continues, has in effect told the workers that State arbitration must be adopted as their ally because it has been incessantly vie/ torious as their enemy. ' 'The philosophical situation," he goes on to remark, "has all the mild simplicity of some fable. A politician, having thoughtfully placed a tenpenny nail so as to puncture a motor tyre, walked round the motor with an air of great glooni, sighed profoundly, and said, 'Ah, these motors never get to their destination somehow. It's no use your sitting in the car. Sit on the) tenpenny nail, and you'll be home in no time.' " MrChesterton denies with indignation the soft impeachment that he is sometimes perversely irrational. — "Lyttelten Times."