The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 14, 1900. INDUSTRIAL LIBERTY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 97, 14 May 1900, Page 2

The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 14, 1900. INDUSTRIAL LIBERTY.

Whlsther the working classes in New Zealand consider that they have got within measurable distance of winning full and complete industrial liberty or not "would be a difficult matter to determine). No doubt employers, or at least the great majority, think that the conditions of labour and the liberty and privileges of labourers have already became sufficiently favourable and ample, and that any further interference by the State on behalf of the wor king classes would be inimical to many of the industries now carried on in the colony. Dismissing from the question the claims or platforms of professional labour agitators on the one side and the objections of the baser class of employers on the other, there yet remains considerable room for improvement in the conditions under "which much of the labour of the colony is carried on, and also for an appreciable extension of the beneficial legislation that has for some years past made the lot of the working man and his family more comfortable, and his position more honourable, than in any other country in the world. How far ahead of other lands we are in this respect may bo gathered from the opinions expressed about us by our American cousins, whose country it was the fashion some years ago to call the working man's paradise. The labour organisations of that country are in all but open revolt against the hardships and restrictions they suffer at the hands of their employers. The Socialist organs are urging as a remedy that workers should go into politics, pointing out what wonderful possibilities there would be in such a step, One editor says:— " What an easy road to freedom! I see in this the day streaks of the coming of labour to its own. I would suggest one thing: that labour unions make the start; that they capture the political power in the cities; that no man who is not in favour of labor, who will not .servo it instead of tho capitalists, shall ever hold office; that those who have been true to labour shall man the ship of state. That organized labour, with the aid of friends and their influence, can do this, there is no doubt. Show the world that you are as intelligent and wise as your brothers in New Zealand, who have blazed the way to industrial liberty." We remember the wise saying that "faraway hills are ever the greenest," and perhaps distance has clothed our conditions with more enchantment than a closer and more intimate knowledge would permit. Yet, be this as it may, the eyes of the working world are upon us, and peoples that are the inheritors of centuries-old evils and disabilities are looking eagerly along the track to better conditions that we have blazed by our enterprise and determination. Nature and circumstances—what we understand as Providence—have made our colony an ideal laboratory of humanitarian research and a sphere lor political experiments of a kindred nature—not that we know what was being worked out by us, or to what attitude of Socialistic attainment we were advancing (and still are making for). And now it is as though there lay on the young shoulders of this land uhe burden of working out the welfare of all lands—of faking up the political

'cause of labour throughout the world. To what " social goal" we are blazing it is not even possible to guess, but in the judgment of our leas favoured fellows in the older countries of the world we have already gained the borders of the working-man's Canaan, where industrial liberty obtains and where the reins of power ore in the hands of the Sons of Toil.