The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 1919. PRESIDENT WILSON ON BUSINESS.

Taihape Daily Times, 11 January 1919, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 1919. PRESIDENT WILSON ON BUSINESS.

(With whicii is tncorporatwfl The '**Jhapn Port ljcJ Walemsl-jo News).

President Wilsojn is for the moment the lion of the world; he is visiting the capitals of Allied nations and he is relieving himself of a good deal of valuable precept. Occasionally what he says to-day requires something said in explanation to-morrow; he is not an Abraham Lincoln, nevertheless he has been blessed with an intelligence well above the average, which differs from that of Lincoln in being academically trained to the degree of professorial pretentions. He has spoken in London, Paris, Rome, and lastly in Turin; he told the Turinese, inter alia, that the pulses of the modem world beat in business houses; that men. who do the business of the world shaped the destinies of the world; 'that peace and war issues were large- ! ly in the hainds of those controlling I the world's commerce. He said to | his audience of North Italians, "You j cannot trade with a man who cannot trust you, and you will not trade with a man whom you cannot trust; trust ! is the life-breath of nations,' relations. Foreign capital takes hold in moder,n states; its processes arc actually processes of conquest." It will be noticed that President Wilson's homilectics only had reference to modertn business , and the modern world. What he states to be the case to-day is not applicable I to the past and may not be applicable i to the future; it is the condition we ' find the. world and business in to-day. : In other words President Wilson tells the Turiiiese people that commercial- ' ism is supreme; that they may view the advent of foreign capital much as ' a marauder bent upon conquest, and he was not deceiving those north Italians. Capital used in business under existing laws and regulation is allpowerful ; capital is king in the world : to-day, and in the hands of men, combines, trusts and syndicates, it crushes , out human life more pitilessly than j that rank brand of militarism which is the cult of Prussia. Militarism kills in spurts, but business is perpetual in its remorselessness, and its operations have the same effect upon communities and nations who get hopelessly into debt as it does upon the unfortunate individual who has his home ajnd belongings sold and is cast penniless on to an unsympathetic world because he cannot pay his debts. Commercialism has developed into ShyIcckism"; every man wants his pound of flesh regardless of whether health and life are at stake. Men of business are shaping the destinies of the world, and what a shaping we see depicted by Mr Lloyd Gorge; what a shaping may be witnessed in the china-;owns and slums of all iarge Americaa oif'as. Men of business have contr>l of the issues of war and peace, in this control they are permitted to seize of the world's commerce; they involve the nations in war, but they tnke care that it is not the blood of the taMx.ess men that is spilled in the fight:ng. Capital is the parallel of fire; it is an unsurpassable servant, one that is a necessity in modern life, but one need not look far for the human wreckage it makes as a master. It is little short of irony of the cruellest kind to say one cannot trade with a man he cainnot trust. The business trust doesn't look for trust; it neither gives any or looks for any; a business deal is wit against wit, and laws made by business men enable them to gamble with what the producer sells by asking four times its marketable value, and if the market value is against them they keep their store doors locked against the people till values are created to satisfy their profiteering proclivities. Truly, trust is the life-breath of nations' relations, and it is because the trust of nations is being exploited to a satanic, remorseless, criminal degree that great statesmen are proclaiming that Britain is fast becoming bankrupt of manhood.; the men, women and children who should be pic-

tures of health are broken in physique, overworked, ill-housed and ill-fed. Business processes are actually processes of conquest; the battlefield on which the human wrecks lie is not local; it extends wherever mocern business reaches, in all countries, amongst all peoples. But why should the producer hand over his commodities to the self-imposed business king, who directly he gets possession turns ( round and tries to crush him? Why create a class that produces nothing, but who largely subsists upon production, a parasite on the producer, a class that accumulates concreted labour into such huge, powerful masses that it can boldly declare war against current and unexpended labour'? It is not the producer or the worker who lives ifr huge palatial buildings surrounded by spacious grounds and having liveried lackeys to wait upon them; it is not the producer or the worker that lives ostentaciously, and callously wastes on the vilest and most vernal of so-called pleasures, desires of the limit in depraved human appetites; it is the business king, the men who President Wilsotn tells the Turinese control the destinies of the world, have the' issues of peace and war in their keeping, in whose houses the pulse of the world beats. Why have the producr and the worker ha/nded" themselves over body and soul to the men who seize upon their work and their production? Europe and America are experiencing what the destiny-making of business is responsible for; the civilised world is in revolt against the ravages of a commercialism that keeps the producer poor and crushes health and life out of the worker, leaving him to slowly starve to death. Anarchy is the destiny that the business President Wilson speaks of is bringing the world to; Bolshevism, as we term it, is alarmingly on the increase in the United States, and nothing but the tyranjay of commercialism is responsible for it. Capital takes hold in foreign states, in all states where it can get entry, and that hold is like the hold of a>n octopus: it sucks its victim dry; its processes are actually and in truth the processes of conquest, and these processes are undeniably 'no less subversive of human life, health and happiness than Prussian militarism and all other militarisms combined. Remove the causes of broken physique, starvation and discomfort, and the support of Anarchy and Bolshevism would quckly become negligible. Bolshevism is little else but a revolt against a system of robbery being the special ! legalised privilege of commercialism. I and the sooner producers and workers | cast off the chains laid upon them the sooner will tbe world return tcMndus- i trial and social peace. j