The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1918 SOCIAL EXPEDIENCY.

Taihape Daily Times, 30 December 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1918 SOCIAL EXPEDIENCY.

(With which is incorporated Tbs T*ihspe P«>»- «~ ad WalesttU'iO News).

At a meeting of the New Zealand Employers' Federation, held recently, the Chairman stated, "The most acute danger in sight, the two Englishspeaking nations, the British Empire and the United States, have to face, is the bitter antagonism between labour and capital." The speaker might have made his utterance still more comprehensive by making it cover the whole inhabited world. We do not agree that the word antagonism is the most correct or the most politic term to use. The relationships are not of a day old, year old, or even century old character, and to dismiss them with the one word antagonism ■is to belittle the subject, conceal the facts, cloud the issue, and create a false situation. It would indeed be a rash man that would state that the blame for what is termed antagonism is attributable to labour, and he would be equally rash who urged that capital had not given cause for labour's antagonism, or, the better word would | be, resentment. During the war, it is not denied, necessaries of life have been forced up in price by capital; we may be quite sure that labour can have no part in such an operation; the increase amounting roughly to up : wards of onethird additional on prewar prices. To make it possible to purchase at the higher, though largoly ; fictitious values, labour had no altor- ; native but to ask for increased wages. ! Did capital realise and admit the jusj tice of labours' request? No, it wns ' resented by every means capital could j invent short of destroying its opporj tunity for profiteering, and herein is ; the first antagonism between capital ! and labour arising out of the war. ' Time after time strikes were risked | in an effort to go on increasing the J cost of living without conceding any- ; thing whereby labour could continue ito work under healthful conditio c:i. ' There are not wanting indications ; that capital has carried antagonism to ! labour so far that it is too late to ' expect acquiesenee with the postulate , that capitalism is a necessity to !abi our, and labour refuses to admit that

it is impotent without the capital as understood by current use of '.-.ho term. Primarily, labour created capital, but as time went on capital assumed a mastery that reduced labour to slav-

ery. What labour did in tb.3 commencement it can do again; v. is capital that is impotent without labour, and the sooner the world recognises that it is man and not money that is supreme the sooner will tbe antagonism talked about vaniVh. As there could have hsiin no capital without labour to delve it from somewhere, the Chairman of the Employers' Association seems ;.o hare adopted a slogan invented by interested people in repeating the cry that "man is naturally lazy." We do not believe that if man is deprived of the legalised power to grab from his neighbour he will have no incentive to work; many of the hardest working, the greatest inventors, of the world had no thought of gain; money was not the incentive; every man's ambition is not to become possessor of that he cannot use, and which rightly belongs to someone else. The extremes between rich and poor, like the causes for war, are attributable to imperfect legislation. Greed gets power of the legislative machinery and turns out one millionaire to a million paupers. Juxtaposed to each other it sets the West End glory of riches and the East End ,ghastliness of poverty, vice, and sqqalour. Capital has put too great, a gulf between it and labour for any tinkering expedients to bridge. It is too late to patch up anything in the way of mutual confidence; the whole system is threatened; war has removed the scales from labour's eyes; inhuman appetite for profits while soldiers' dependents were left to starve was the last straw labour could carry, and there are unmistakable signs that the whole load is to be jettisoned. Labour has realised that if man is not naturally lazy it is invariably the men who do not work that ge,t possession of and become the representatives of capital, and lord it over those who do work; they have had it rudely forced upon them that they labour to pro- <

duce capital for middlemen to gamble with, and for trusts, combines, and syndicates to rob labour of its birthright with. The Employers' Federation Chairman has a fear that public I opinion is not behind capitalism, and' !he impressed upon his hearers that lit is a more effective regulator of conduct than a legal statute. Why? Is it because the penal statute is an unjust enactment that, doep not accord with public opinion ; and, if that is so, was it labour or capital that placed the unjust penal measure on the Statute book? We make no" pretension to exhaustive criticism of the speech under notice; it is merely a fringe here and there that is selected for comment, for we realise to the full that it is not the general shopkeeper and the trust-free industrialist that is any source of danger to the stability of society, only in so far as they lend assistance to the large combines of capital from whom they must take much of their merchandise owing to the controls that have T)een established. There is little cause for doubting that antagonism between capital and labour does exist and that it will shortly be made undeniable by open rupture. Capital is striving for a continuance of its inhuman profittvring which has estranged from it the last vestige of public opinion, tnd there are ffeep, ominous rumblings throughout the yule labour world which may break out into open declaration of war at any moment. Capital has crushed and limited labour into being a mere cog in the economic machine, "a piece of mechanism without human feelings or desires." This, says the Employers' Federation Chairman, should be altered. If each employer would set his mind to remedy this reasonable grievance, and endeavour to improve conditions of life, much could be speedily accomplished. "Abolish these great evils," says the speaker, "and you go far fo have a contented and prosperous" nation. Here is an acknowledgment that the men have grievances, but the majority of the employers that Mr Weston was addressing were not culpable, or at least to only a very minor and reflective extent. The time for expediency has passed; the masses of the people in all civilised communities have been so rounded up, trapped and starved by the huge combines of capital, that nothing, but the utter destruction of the whole system will suffice to ensure permanent emancipation. Capital has filched the riches that labour produces and it hands back a. pittance that is miserably inadequate for..' purchasing the necessities for maintaining healthful life that "enables labour to continue producing. Broken in physique ill-fed and ill-housed men are forced down into the lowest depths of degraation, in which there is no work whereby he may live as a human; he strives and fights in the inhuman underworld for any scrap to relieve his famishing, and so it is the great seething human mass of non-workers, non-producers, paupers, is being addto until about one in every seven men in Britain has to be worked for and kept by >the other six. There is no justification for a social system that tolerates idle rich any more than idle poor, the one that is forced to idleness or he that is idle by choice. The way to avoid the feared revolution is for everyone to work; to make idleness penal, and enact just laws that make the man supreme and puts capital in its proper domain. The age of commercialism has run to madness, to destruction of the race; it has passed its zenith, and something for human betterment is arising from the ashes of the destruction it has wrought. Greed is* going the way of Kaiserism. and any social status built Up by expedients will prove little more than a fool's paradise.