The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1926. THREE YEARS’ INDUSTRIAL PEACE

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12609, 20 November 1926, Page 4

The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1926. THREE YEARS’ INDUSTRIAL PEACE

Every right-thinking person will hope that the “Daily Mail’* represents the solid truth. According to that journal, the British trades union leaders and some men prominent in the Parliamentary Labour Party are organising a campaign to arrange a three-years’ industrial peace. _. . Ihe spirit of this is eminently right. Trades unionism was founded to promote industrial peace, and for that reason received legislative recognition. Its original method was paradoxical, inasmuch as it aimed at peace through war, and for this we have but to remember the day of the Sheffield “rattenings,” together with the fearless courage against the “ratteners” of Greathead of the Sheffield Press, and the labours and revelations of the Royal Commission which followed,

Those “rattening” methods were, of course, futile as well as ferocious, but, after all, it can be said for them that there was in the then status of labour some excuse. Also, that the spirit was much the same in some ways as the spirit which induced the great armament policies of the great Powers, which Were allegedly defensive and peaceful. The similarity extended to results, for neither industrial wars nor national wars were prevented. After the defensive need of labour was recognised by the law, the unions flourished a.nd grew rich. They also grew powerful, and they began to divert its use from industrial to political purposes. From this development came direct action, which arranged a famous revolutionary action after the Great War. That policy crumpled so quickly that it may well be referred to now as a thing stillborn. But the mighty railway strike followed, and later came the mightiest strike of industrial history—-*tbe great coal strike, which is now, after prodigious disasters, slowly subsiding. t , Thus it can be said to be higK time for labour to cultivate seriously the original industrial spirit. Paradoxes and vain combats have proved beyond doubt that big-scale strikes are ruinous to the nation as well as to the strikers, and that the nation can hold the mastery over any strikes, no matter how well-organised or how wealthy they may be. “Rattenings” and peaceful methods having alike failed, it is time to cultivate the ways of reason. For the fact has emerged that, whatever else may be considered, industrial peace must be maintained. The national safety admits no other consideration. • In arranging the campaign for a three-years industrial peace, the union leaders are obviously sincere, and for the sincerity of th<Parliamentarian participants, with Mr Ramsay MacDonald and Mr Clynes and others, their careers speak volumes. The presence in this gallery of Mr Ramsay MacDonald is an especial guarantee that this campaign of peace deserves success. It is a good beginning of a new phase. If peace is kept by reasonable ways unbroken for three years, what can ever prevent it from being permanent? It is also a vast Subject, perhaps, of much complicated detail. Of the proposals nothing has been said, and nothing can be known. All we can say, with any anproach to confidence at this moment, is that Labour is acting with good sense and goodwill. It has been shown the limits of its power, and it is apparently willing to use that power, still great, within those limits, in an organised effort for securing a long period—long in these days of unrest —of industrial peace. If this leads to a corresponding effort on the part of capital, and overcomes the indiscipline of the extreme Labour section, the world may look forward to the future with every confidence.