The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 1917. GREED AND LUST.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 14 March 1917, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 1917. GREED AND LUST.

[ witn which is incorporated The iaihapo Post and Waimarino News).

In the future, after the war, it will be interesting to have the chronicling of what has taken place during the conflict, read back to us. We shall then be made aware of the full extent of exploitation and robbery to which innocent people have been subjected by their fellow-countrymen; we shall learn that the most bestial passions of greed and lust have been loosed and practised upon those who should be succoured; that while men are giving their lives and performing deeds of heroism to save their niothers, wives, sisters, and children from the brutal, ravaging Hun, traitors and shirkers left at home have been doing their utmost to deprive them of the means ol obtaining sufficient food and clothing to keep them in health. The stamina of the nation is without a thought while taese parasites are growing 'rich on what they filch ana extort from the people. We have war with all vengenace; it is war upon war, and war within war. Men at war are attacked by those for whom they are fighting, with means that would shame the worst assassin, for they practice their greed and lust upon the helpless ones the fighters have left at home in their care. While the war in various theatres is destroying millions of good lives and returning an abundant hardest of maimed, crippled, blind and demented, leeches and parasites are destroying the stamina of those whom they should seek to assist, and making millions of human wrecks of one kind or another by their lust and depraved humanity. Is the fighting in stinct in some of our race so mixed with cowardice and fear, that while it renders them afraid to face the national enemy, they do not hesitate to attack the helpless and innocent of their own people? And most amazing, the most inhuman offenders are those who are already rich, many of them to affluence. They control articles of food and refuse to allow people to eat { unless an extortionate sum of money is paid to them, a sum that no ordinary worker can earn; but who must

eat, so lie goes to the very men who have cornered that whereby he must live, ana he says, you have raised the price of what I and my family urgently need to keep body and soul together to such an extent that you must raise my wages so that I may be able to pay your price. He is met with a resolute No, and the worker, with his family, go on wanting until he iui vokes the aid of conciliation and arbitration laws, or refuses to work. All this is being noted now, and there will be a flood of literature after the war on this very subject. The utmost ramifications of the exploiter will be laid bare, the tragedies in our homes will make more blood-curdling x’eading than the tragedies of the trenches. The men who have fought in the trenches will exact reparation | from the traitorous filchers from the helpless left at home. Men at the front are having their sense of honour and right sharpened, and they will come home to rub up the obtuse and blunted honour and humanity of those s who have gone mad in their avarice and Agreed. Boards of Trade, Efficiency Boards, Boards for the regulation of prices, boards and committees gaiore have been appointed, in face we have a superabundance, a surfeit of boards, but what real good have they done? One Minister of the Crown who feared money less than he feared the masses, could have kept peace in the minds of that huge body of the population on which the greatness of any nation or the future must depend, it is nothing but sheer disregard of human right for the Government and other employers of labour to refuse to pay higher wages in the face of prices that in many cases should be illegal. Every section of a community suffers from exploitation as well as by eve.y other kind of robbery, except the exploiter and the robber, who continues to get something for nothing all the time. People fanont buy of the business man, and the shopkeeper finds his supplies regulated, even the prices he must sell at are often fixed for him by the cornerer or exploiter, who condescends to allow him to sell his cornered goods. This systematised thieving has about reached its climax, social and political changes are on the tapis that will bring about a new condition, from which inhuman proclivitk the slave to greed and lust will be eliminated as far as possible; when the worker will have a purchasing power that will cause business men to flourish naturally, and our laws will be made to enforce that which is just instead of being a shield to trusts, syndicates, and other classes of wealthy exploiters, thieves and robbers of the helpless.