The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 6. SHACKLED.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 254, 6 March 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 6. SHACKLED.

One o£ the most useful truths spoken by a Labor man for some time is an assertion of Mr. W. V. Osborne —famous because of the "Osborne judgment." Mr. Osborne said:

There can be no liberty in the industrial world if a majority of the employees are able to say, "You shall join a union before you will be able to work, and, once in, you shall adopt the political principles submitted to you."

A majority of employees in the industrial world coerces the whole as a protest against coercion or possible coercion by the employers. The yoke is not removed, but the drivers are changed. In effect, the workers have fought for freedom in order to enslave their kind, have insisted on the right of man to use his own brains so that they may be cast into a mould by the machine, and have by patient effort in achieving "preference for unionists," done much to prove that working qualifications do not count and that individual opinion is undesirable. Whatever a "majority of employees" may do by way of coercing unionists into uniform action, it is unable to coerce the thoughts and ideas of and although you may say to a unionist or any other coerced person, "you shall adopt the political or religious principles submitted to you," no method exists for enforcing this order. It is easy enough with the help of the State to enforce unionism or starvation on a worker, but it is impossible to guage either his political or religious convictions, or to be sure the brand he wears is the stauip of political or religious ownership. It is happily just as true today as ever it was that you "may drive a horse to water, but you cannot make, him drink," and you may drive a man to unionism without making him a true disciple of unionism and to the; poll with-' out being able to make him- vote for a Labor candidate. There are, Tory workers just as there are Radical dukes, and the great army of bare-armed men would be capable of thinking for themselves ,and guiding their own actions if there .were no machine to carefully coerce their lives and thoughts and works. Mr. Osborne, in that speech which has a chance of becoming historic, eulogised the Australian system of trades unions "which were composed of men of all shades of politics." It would be equally true to say that English trades unions were composed of men of all shatjes of politics, for it is absurd to hold that any mass of workers«should"votc solid" on any ,one point, or for any group of politicians > or religionists. It is certain, however, that in Australia the . organisation of trades unionists has been political as well as protective, that leaders really have great influence in dominating the thoughts of their comrades, and that the political effect of such organisation is the return" of- Labor members to Australian Parliaments. The grim Star Chf.mber methods of caucuses, the insistence on obedience to a set line of conduct evolved by a dominating party in time becomes ob■oxious to those whose rigid observance is demanded. It is quite untrue that either in Australia or New Zealand there are "purely industrial trades unions." The political side of Australasian trades unions is almost as prominent as their industrial side, and political organisation is a's common a catchword as industrial organisation. As far as New Zealand is concerned, almost all bodies have a political side and political aspirations, and although it is commonly stated that so far trades unions' organisation of the political kind -has returned only one "Labor" member to Parliament, outside critics persist in believing that we have a "Labor" Government. Trades unionism is active and successful in New Zealand, and is palpably political in many aspects, but curiously no organisation or coercion has had the result of placing an aggressive Lnbor Party in the House of Representatives. The people of New Zealand may be credited with a desire not to put men into Parliament because they are tenacious to a political dogma, but because they are the men they want irrespective of expressions of party faith. It is impossible to foresee a time when a coercive Labor Government doing its business in the dark and arranging the legislative conduct of a Parliament when it is not sitting shall dominate New Zealand. We do not believe that trades unionists or any other people in New Zealand can be forced to "adopt the political or religious principles submitted" to them, and we see no chance for the entry into Parliament of men who are out-and-out "Labor" just because of their dogma and not because of themselves. New Zealand wants the jam, not the tin; the sugar, not the-bag; the man, not the label. If Australia has the men it wants their label does not matter. If British trades unionists think as one man, they deserve the political confusion that will come to them. If a majority of employees punish a man for non-unionism by making it impossible to get work, they rob him of the freedom of action which was presumably the goal aimed at in the beginning of trades unionism. If any body dictates a political creed to its victims, presuming obedience, it is digging its own political grave, and asking its presumed supporters to kindly shovel the earth in. The industrial worm was engaged in a great and good work when it turned on the oppression of the folk whose cash dominated the situation. And the industrial worm is everywhere showing a disposition to turn on its alleged friends who use the worm as a creature to be carefully coerced into a set lino nf thought, action and aspiration, methods that may be gratifying to the inventors, but which will brine their own political punishment.