CURRENT TOPICS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 227, 31 January 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS

WHAT HOPE? The secretary of the Socialist Federation of Australia lias received a letter from Brussels advocating a general strike of all operatives engaged in the production of "munitions of war." It is a quaint assumption that men engaged in the manufacture of destructive agents should be the one body without any instinct to use them. It is quainter still that Australia, which is almost as infantile as New Zealand in its manufacture of man-destroying machinery, should have been approached. One imagines the important influence a strike of Australian small arms or cartridge makers would have in Krupp's Essen works, or Armstrong's, the Navy dockyards, or elsewhere. A world strike of men engaged in such industries would, one may assume, kill the industries. But the self-abnegation of the thousands of men engaged in them, who would at once cripple their careers, wouldn't alter the desire of the average man or the average nation to quarrel. People used to fignt pretty hard and pretty constantly when every man fashioned his own weapons, and if the navies of the world were "scrapped" and the armorers became ploughmen, some means might be found of siiedding blood according to age-old precedent. If the enormous bodies of men now employed night and day in perfecting by every means engines for the destruction of people courted poverty by throwing down their tools the world would look aghast at such evidence of unselfishness. If specimens of such altruism became common one might expect the manufacturing chemist to go out of business, for fear someone might drink his prussic acid, or the cutler to cease cutling for fear of possible suicides. Every modern nation will admit with great cheerfulnes* that war is wicked, Out no nation ceases preparations for indulging in the wickedness. The Socialist who does not want the nations to cut each other's throats must produce a new human nature which, even though it has plenty of death-dealing weapons, reiuses to use them. To accomplish greater triumphs in death-dealing machinery, the brightest genius of the nations' is concentrated. The genius who desires cessation of war has no chance of success in attacking the machine. He must get at the man and the man's mind. Without the man, the machine is as harmless as a pat of butter. If one could believe that the twentieth century was to be the one of an infinite procession of centuries during which it was decided "there shall be no more war," one might feel comforted by the fact that Brussels Socialists were trying to stop war by starving the men who made war machinery, but there is no evidence that human nature has changed since that interesting day when Israel slew twelve thousand of the men of Ai with primitive spears and burnt their city and all that was in it with the same sort of fire that is obtainable iu these days of peace and goodfellowship.

FEEDING THE PEOPLE. A cablegram mentioning that through the offices of Sir George Rem the importation of frozen Australian meat would be allowed in Switzerland, is interesting as showing the increasing dependence of the stomach of the nations on the sea. There is not a country in Europe that can feed itself adequately, and constant increase in town population all over the civilised world is making the people of crowded areas more dependent on emptier lands. The tremendous increase in sea transport and its wonderful efficiency has probably done more than anything else to undermine the self-de-pendence of the people of most countries. Millions of tons of food are always on the sea, and it follows that if sea traffic had not advanced further than in th* days of the Georges, immense proportions of it would still be produced by the people who cat it. The Londoner eats bread grown twelve thousand miles away, the New Zealandur consumes jam that was grown in Kent, the continental eats sheep whose last bleat was heard on the other side of the world, and nowadays even the black man in the interior of Africa is not unacquainted witli the tinned beef that was killed in Chicago. And so, of course, seeing that there is less necessity for the Britisher or tin German or the Swiss to grow his own food, there is more necessity for him to be employed in some other way. li is possible to imagine an international condition in which the food ships failed to reach their destinations, and for there to be at least a temporary reversion to pre-steamsliip days, when of necessity each country grew the larger portion of its own food supply. The necessity for outside help has complicated the needs of society,) so that to-day nations that aforetime knew nothing and cared nothing for each other are eagerly united in the bonds of food. The fate of every nation on earth lies in its ability to get enough to eat and drink and 'in a state of world war, the nation that had the most food would ultimately dominate the situation. Few of us worry about the subject until we are hungry, but being hungry it is an easy step to imagine a country dependent on outsiders robbed of its food, pleading for mercy, but most of all to be fed. Each year increases the quantity of food that is carried on the sea, emphasising the increase in the interdependence of nations. The country that neglects to develop its food resources is a country that will feel a siiiKing sensation in the pit of the stomach when food is the one essential of existence.