MR HUGHES' CONDEMNATION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVIV, Issue 48, 1 February 1916, Page 4

MR HUGHES' CONDEMNATION.

A Sydney correspondent, wrilin

January 19th, says:—All the fervour and vigor of which the Prime Minis-

tor has command are being employed in his public speeches ou the eve of his departure for London in castigation and condemnation of those in the Labor party who counsel workers to hinder the Fedora! Government’s present recruiting scheme as a form of detestable conscription, and say that it

is a capitalists’ war; that Australia is controlled by capitalists; and even that.it wotdd make little or no difference to the workers here if Germany were to be conqueror. With fierce invective, Mr Hughes denounces such men as “leeches” and “parasites” who have attached themselves to the body of the Labor party, “seek to take up their foul abode in the vitals of their host, and to speak for it.” Other terms of denunciation employed by Mr Hughes are “syndicalists” and “anarchists,” and lie says, with emphatic repetitions, “These men know no nationality, religion, or principle, and in the name of unionism and laborisir i cast them out like devils out ol swine.” It has been made plain recently that the Labor Councils of Melbourne and Brisbane have been captured by men of the kind thus attacked by Mr Hughes, and some unions, including that of the miners now on strike at Broken Hill, and the Australian Workers’ Union in Queensland have shown themselves to he dominated by tfye same spirits. As the Melbourne Argus says, Mr Hughes, in making these attacks, is possibly driving nails into his own political coffin, because official Labor, once defied, is implacable in its thirst for revenge.