THE FLOURY WAR. Up Goes the Trust and Down Comes the Loaf.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 206, 11 June 1904, Page 6

THE FLOURY WAR. Up Goes the Trust and Down Comes the Loaf.

SO the Flcair Trust has collapsed, and the millers of Christchurch and Dunedm are going for each other hammer and tongs Odd thing is that this peaceful community looks upon the fraternal strife with perfect composure In fact, there is a spirit of levity abroad which prompts the man m the street to> whoop for joy. Seeing that it means a sudden drop m the price of floui and the cheapening of the nceessary household loaf, the man m the street may be forgiven • • * For om pait, we have no reluctance in expressing satisfaction at the dissolution of the millers' combine Corners, trusts, and combines are all inimical to the public weal, inasmuch as their mainspring is to boost up prices and restrict output. Whicu reminds us that the sawmillers are just now engaged in this very game, so that the unfortunate public may continue to pay top prices for building material in a country that is bountifully endowed with timber. The Wellington landlord receives a good deal of hard knocks for his high rents, but people are apt to forget that behind him sits the sawmiller with his stiff price-list, the tax-col-lectoi, and the trades-unionist • » # More than that, as Mr Duthie very aptly pointed out in his speech at the Exchange Hall this week. Labour has also established a very healthy trust of its own which, by raising trades union wages all round, has made the struggle to live all the harder for the large army of clerks, civil servants, shop assistants, and warehousemen who are outside the Labour Trust altogether, and whose wages do not move up with the Arbi-

fcration Court s decrees and the price of goods. Let the trades unionist, therefore, control his glee as he watches the Millers' Trust tumbling to pieces. He is playing the same game himself. • * • Still, we are glad, for the sake of the people at large, that, with the winter on, their daily bread will be brought a little more within their reach. The open market, with the spirit of competition abroad, is the most, wholesome thing for the public At the same time, it is just as well to remind people who are inclined to rail at the flour-millers 1 and the sawmillers, that there are combines and combines » » • The union worker, as well as the big employer, are both tarred with the same brush, and it is the large class between — the farmers, the clerks, the shop-assistants, and the crowded lists of unorganised labour — who get left every time in these combinations to raise wages and goods to an artificial level of value The healthiest sign of the times is that the Trust— even when engineered by a multi-millionaire like Pierpont Morgan — is an unseaworthy craft, and soon falls to pieces It rarely outlives a season of heavy weather. So far as the Millers' Trust is concerned, the people will do well to bear m mind the millers who refused to join the combine