The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1918 WAGES AND COST OF LIVING.

Taihape Daily Times, 17 September 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1918 WAGES AND COST OF LIVING.

(With which is Incorporated The £aihape Post and News).

The Wellington by-election, if no other candidates come into the field, is going to be a fight, a game of cut-throat. It will probably be found that labour has made another of the series of mistakes that have been the rule since the I.W.W. voice was raised so loudly in labour councils as to silence or render unheard the solid, sensible, sane leaders of the ilk of the good old Knights of Labour days; when workers met, discussed calmly and decided deliberately the great problems that stood in the way of uniform justice being meted out to all; when meetings were not •howled at, hustled and hunted into acquiescence with something their intelligence warned them was not likely to achieve the best. The council s of labour were free from the raving red-ragger, or apostle of 1.W.W.-ism in those days; but what did they accomplish as compared with what is being accomplished in later days'? Almost every beneficient land law, and every statute that stands on the statute book to-day, raising labour to a plane of justice, high above oppression and that inequality before and under the law that did actually obtain thirty to forty years ago, was placeG there by the efforts of bodies of sensible workers, long before the men of the I.W.W.’ were heard in the land. In examining the statute book and scrutinising newspapers issued in the last ten to txventy years what laws do we find benefitting labour that workers under the sway of the I.W.W. have succeeded in placing there, or, what new proposals for enactment in behalf of the betterment of the masses do ■\ye see advocated in the newspapers? There is a surfeit of the platitudes that were used by Lenin and Trotsky I in their destruction of Russia, and • which were 'the stock-in-trade by which the people of Australia were cajoled into putting a blot on the Commonwealth escutcheon that will never rub off despite the supremely glorious efforts of the brave Australians that have fought in Gallipoli and France, or in either place. Labour under the I.W.W. is a curse upon itself; in Russia this is proved to beyond all question; in Australia the burnings, destruction and murder commenced, but labour was too well educated to he drawn into the revolutionary vortex over which the red flag had been,hoisted, and that sane, educated labour saved something of the country’s honour. To emphasise the practicability of political labour in past days as compared with the moonshiny blitherings of the Bolsheviki which are being repeated by men striving to drag labour into revolution to-day, we have looked through the minute book of an old Knights of Labour lodge. There we find a series of discussions on how to improve the workers’ condition; we find minutes which indicate that lodges throughout New Zealand exchanged opinions on the subjects mentioned. Perhaps the most important subject was that 'Of making land available to workers who had absolutely no money, and the special settlement idea, and the deferred payment; the occupation with right of purchase; the eternal lease, as they termed it. were all cradled and nursed Into maturity in those old-time meetings of labour. At a meeting of labour to-day, it Is the everlasting drivel about anti-conscription; opposing the efforts of the Government to successfully prosecute"war work; a question of a strike here, or a strike there, nothing to improve the lot of the masses beyond encouraging the whirligig of higher wages and higher cost of living. We know it is the I.W.W. element that furnishes the great majority of the subjects for discussion, but the mass of workers know very well without newspapers having to draw attention to it, that higher wages and higher cost of living are a sort of Siamese twin that cannot be separated by any known legislative science,

and why do they allow their time to be wasted and their intelligence warped by the I.W.W. red herring? The great mass of workers know quite well that the only way" to higher wages ana lower, cost of living is through tae means of production of the necessaries of life, of all that makes life worth while. While population increases conditions must become worse and starvation or bloody revolution is the ultimate of the I.W.W. industrial strike doctrine. It is impossible to improve unless more food and more money conies with greater population. Old-time labour realised that all food and all riches came from the land, and they strived year ' after year till they got millions of acres settled with workers; they produced more of that which fed and clothed them, gave a greater value to the land, and a greater spending power to the masses, businesses in the centres flourished, and wages everywhere increased. If labour of to-day would only commence a campaign with the object of having every acre of land cultivated and making it produce the utmost it is capable of, all surplus labour would find highly remunerative occupations, and that which enables higher wages to be pam with a decreased cost of living would be increased a thousand-fold. There would then be money to pay higher wages and a plentitude of food; but while workers are cajoled and hustled into listenfng to the inane blitherings, the impracticable verbage, insane idealism of the Lenin and Trotsky order, and which resulted in ’Australia voting antx-c'onscription, only bloody revolution can he the ultimate. The following is what the Socialist candidate for the Wellington Central seat in Parliament retails to his audiences:; he say r s: “Some day, near or far, under the inspiration of the red flag, the hideous mirk and squalor, the sordid commercialism of our modern cities shall he swept away, and in the star-flowered meadows under sweet blue skies men and women who toil shall dance and sing and rejoice.” What makes men and womiin happy lies in the land awaiting the time when the masses of the people will cease to listen to such wishywashy sentiment, and will extract all they need, and still leave ample for the unborn millions to follow. We are only interested in the Wellington Central election in so far as it affects the Dominion’s welfare, and that gives us the right to hope that the electors will have nothing to do with a policy that can only result in the increase of squalor and misery in citiei