The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1920. ECONOMIC MILITARISM.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3576, 11 September 1920, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1920. ECONOMIC MILITARISM.

With, which is incorporated “The Taihape Post and Waimarino News ”

The labour and cost of living problems are increasingly danger-fraught and it is evident that both are fast assuming an unprecedently acute stage. Courts are fixing wages on a basis of the cost of living as current at the time, and within only a month or two necessaries of life have advanced in price by about fifty per cent, averagely, and taking all appearances into consideration the time for a general settlement of the whole vexed question is not now far distant. If this Dominion is to be guided safely through the quicksands of labour and the shoals of trust and combine profiteering and exploitation it seems that indiscreet people must be kept out of active guidance of parties on both sides in the great economic struggle that is now no longer a matter for pretence, but is being again and again openly declared. Unpardonable errors of judgment and an insufficient knowledge of the true situation is everywhere evident, even in Parliament. The number of traders in this Dominion that can justly be classed as profiteers and exploiters of the people are few, and it is likewise true that the receivers of really exorbitant wage s amongst workers are also few. There is a very large proportion of workers whose occupations neither take them into coalmines, on to wharves or into sawmills, and it is that large body of workers who are bearing the increasing acuteness of the privations from which they suffer without raising their voices by way of protest; and whether those who are not in the wage-earning class are as conversant as it is essential they should be with the fact that this large army is/ fast passing into the ranks behind extremists, does not alter the fact that that is what is actually happening. It is much too frequently staled at this stage that joining in with extremists will enable workers to reach somewhere, and change something, but whatever it is it cannot be worse than what is being suffered at the present time. Labour is organising, and employers are organising, and what are they both so perfervidly organising for if not for war to a finish? It cannot be denied that New Zealand has ample of many of the necessaries to human existence and yet those i necessaries cannot be purchased, they are not available for use only by the wealthy classes who have the money to buy, whatever the shortage of supply or the hugeness of price demanded. ’Whether it is generally noticed or not the old gag about the two classes of society, “The Haves and the Have-nots, is indeed being forced to the front as never before, and because it is dangerously so, our readers are urged to take no superficial or factious view of the situation. It Is truly alarming to read of an Arbitration Court Judge being so lacking in tact as to tell workers that coal and sugar -were becoming so scarce that j they would not require to spend I money on those articles.'’ Does that Judge mean that there is to be such a widening in the lot of the “Haves” and the “Have-nots” that the latter have to bo content with a remuneration for their labour that will not permit of them having some share in the coal that is mined, and in the sugar that monopolies are kind and humane enough to produce in New Zealand for the use of New Zealanders? That Judge virtually tells workers whose case is before hi& court

that even if he granted their demands (Hey would still be unable to buy coal and sugar, and therefore it was no use increasing their wages. The workers, in reply, contended that in what coal and sugar were available the workers were certainly entitled to share, but His Honour did not favour that view and he refused the increase j asked for. tn a case of this kind it is evident that the justice or otherwise of the workers’ claim did wot wholly sway the mind of the Judge as it should have done. His opinion as to whether the cost and supply of coal and sugar would put those commodities beyond the reach of any i wages the Court might award had no i right to have entered the question, / let alone to have influenced his decision. It is most sincerely hoped that j some error has got into the report for it is past belief that a judge while j exercising jurisdiction could have seriously intended what the report from Auckland states. If the report, is correct a bomb-shell has been cast into the labour camp that will be desperately resented. If the judge was not, in such a remark, forcing workers into the ranks of extremism it is not understandable what else he was doing. There surely should be an economic equilibrium, an equipoise between employers and employees attainable if both parties desired to avoid devastating rupture, but there is virtually no evidence to substantiate the view that the leaders on either side have any "real desire to arrive at an economic equipoise which would he unjust to neither. A spirit of arrogant domination on one side, and unjustifiable resentment on the other blocks the way to a system of conference that should provide the modus operand! for the settlement of all such economic differences. But once more there is the attitude that proclaims more loudly than words that neither party honestly desires any settlement consonant with the commonweal. There is ecouomic muddlement throughout the whole western world; boasted western civilisation is not strong enough to support itself, its foundations are not sufficiently solid to support the superstructure of economic madness which is being heaped upon them, and hence it is that eastern peoples are whispering to each other, “the westerns are committing race suicide, they are killing each other in millions in a struggle rendered unavoidable by greed.’f The modern temple of commerce is defiled ibeyond belief and description; if it needed a •••Christ with knotted cords to purge the temple of crazy finance, unjust moneychanging, dishonest trading nineteen hundred years ago, what is the power required to cleanse the modern temple of its trading and money-changing filth? It is too obvious that if the saving of human life was the first consideration of human beings, there would be a world-wide effort to distribute food among the millions that are now dying of starvation. When men enter a Court for the pretended purpose of just arbitration they are neither deceiving themselves or others. When employers unjustly force down the remuneration labour needs to live upon, and when labour goes into Court striving to obtain a remuneration that is grossly out of congruity with reasonable wage parity they equally constitute a danger to the peace of the community and a disturbing factor in international economics. It is now virtually idle to expect anything but more intense economic strife, and eastern peoples begin to see clearly in what it will end. They are amazedly viewing western civilisation rushing into destruction and oblivion: they are already contemplating the end of this era* of civilisation, which had its birth many thousands of years ago in eastern countries, and they are discussing the evidences in support of the probability that the birth of the new civilisation that is to come will also take place among eastern peoples. Economic militarism is prosecuting just as insane and hopeless a war as over Prussian or any other militarism did. i It is courting defeat and oblivion, and however incapable western people are to see and realise what eastern' people clearly see and realise, tEers seems to be no possibility of redemption unless a modern god-man is blessed with the power to wield the knotted cords as effectively as Iho Upturner of the tables of the moneychangers, and the Thrower-out of trading cheats ang swindlers did in purging the temple nearly two thousand years ago. Surely there is food for much serious thought in the economic turmoil that is now threatening j civilisation. (