MR MARSH ROBERTS AND LABOUR.

Shannon News, 16 May 1922, Page 4

MR MARSH ROBERTS AND LABOUR.

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—Some people in Levin Lad a slight suspicion that Mr Marsh Roberts was a bit of an actor (as well as an ex-parson), and that he had . a capacity for acting his as occasion demanded. His first speech delivered to the W.E.A. at Broken Hill must definitely dispel this illusion. He stuck fast to his Levin colours. Showing new thoughts out of his own personality, he runs rough-shod through ready-made theories and conventionalities with a matchless courage. One of his chief bet noires is the ignorant worker and the asinine doings' of organised Labour, on the quite sensible principle l that Labour progresses more by punching it on the thick head than by making it believe in vain things. Thus, .n----directly, Mr Roberts is rendering Labour an incalculable service. Another bugbear of this redoutable mentor is the Irishman; yet in his ways he himself is as much of an Irishman as a Welshman could well be. This goes to show the manifold peculiarities i f human nature. The facts compel us to agree to Mr Roberts’s indictment of Labour and the Labour movement. It is steeped in sloth. It spends immense efforts in trying to gain some paltry sixpence a day while entirely neglecting the fundamental items of vits own press and education. There appears to be no benzine in its tank. The average worker (there are some exceptions) will go bn chewing the cud peacefully so long as he can assimilate a few pots of barley juice and attend to the general doings of Gloaming and Desert Gold. Education, love and understanding of nature, li/terature, art, science, divine music—these are nothing to him. It is a bovine existence. That is generally accepted as a fact; but where Mr Marsh. Roberts makes a serious mistake is in bitterly blaming the workers for their stupidity. There he is unsound and unjust. This is the regular defect of most middle-class or bourgeois would-be Labour leaders. They begin with quite a religious fervour to “help the worker.” They go forward impetuously for a few years, then reaction comes. They find the workingman heedless, ungrateful, unresponsive and rude, calling them hard names in the bargain owing to their class. So they are definitely disappointed with this kind of “cattle,” and go back to mother and society. This applies, among many others, to such men as Alex. Thompson, and even the great H. G. Wells, a radical mystic, of whom Mr Roberts mentions the sneering remarks about. Labour in his “Outline of History.” These wellmeaning, clever men criticise a class whose trials and vicissitudes they only superficially grasp. They have that dreamy artistic temperament with an absolute aversion to -he studying of the dismal science, so they publicly boot economics. Another class which comes under the same category is the average cleric. There is not one in a hundred who tries to understand the workers’ position, or who can talk sense when he tries. I do not blame them. They are almost wholly mystics, their mind in the clouds, so that their feet seldom touch terra firma. To come back io the cause of the workers’ sloth: First of all, it is a well known scientific fact that if a man spends his vital energy through his muscles, as the worker aloes, he has none left, to supply the brain. Then the second fundamental fact—that these failings are chiefly due to the hundreds of generations of yokels and labourers of whose minds jthe workers of to-day are the direct I inheritors. It is not the worker’s {fault, but his misfortune, to have to | carry the sum total of man’s inhu- | manity to man on his back—perhaps lof a thousand centuries. He is a i mentally sick man. The remedy for such is not the cat-o’-nine-tails, but a sick bed, a teacher and a kindly nurse. Had I the power, I would make it a condition* that no cleric, lawyer, trader or politician should pass harsh criticism against the wageworker unless such critic had first served at least- ten years at some stiff trade on wages, or five years as a hod { carrier, or fireman in the hold of a

ship, mine or gravel pit, on the glorious dry hash which is the daily food of the working man.—l am, etc.,

SOCIALIST Weraroa, May 10, 1922.