CO-OPERATION V. MONOPOLY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1991, 7 January 1890, Page 3

CO-OPERATION V. MONOPOLY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I am informed that that beneficent employer of six men and two boys proposes boycotting me to prevent me from getting employment tor the heinous crime of writing my last letter on this subject. This is the way professional agitators are made. 1 wont quarrel with him about work C * an a an d if I can show the six men and two boys how they can retain the fleecings of their labor ——his profit—they would be ungrateful dogs if they allowed me to suffer for conferring such a boon on them. To think of keeping me out of employment is very foolish, for, as the nursery rhyme has it— The devil finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.

The facility with which he put on the cap proves that it fitted him very well. But I had no personal motive for selecting him. I took his establishment as a bandy illustration of a wrong that is being perpetrated every day, and every hour, all over the civilised world. A short time ago four men were taken off the street to a job that lasted four hours, and for the work they did in those four hours their employer got £2 8s and paid them jointly 16s. No one will deny that a shilling an hour is very fair pay to a man who is regularly employed from 40 hours to 50 hours a week, but I

submit that 16s is not a fair equivalent for labor that is worth 48s. An English writer quoted by Henry George —-and more recently by Mr Moore in his Geraldine essay—says there are only three classes of men—workers, beggars, and thieves. Men that live and get rich on fleecing labor are, in plain English, thieves. But I have no personal quarrel with them on that account, because most of the men they fleece would as willingly fleece them if they had the chance. It is the system, or conditions, we live under that draws out and cultivates the lowest and worst traits of human nature. The fleecers are as trulv

victims of that system as the fleeced are. To say they are not is only equal to saying they don’t know any better. As ?t: Paul wrote : There is a life of plants, a life of beasts, and a life of man. Those who are content with accumulating wealth and gratifying mere animal instincts are not enjoying the life of man. "We are all endowed with at least the germs of a nature that cannor. be satisfied with toil, business, wealth, or the giddy whirl of frivolity. When we see men acting to each other as if they were beasts of prey sis days of every week and going to church on a Sunday we are apt to conclude that religion and morality are only a hollow sham. But

I cannot agree with those who believe that it is only a cloak. The perY petuation of the sham seems to me a proof that the noble characteristics of humanity are not dead, but somnolent. The better social conditions we see approaching will draw out and develope higher and better traits of human jHfcature. Those who are wedded to a dying individualism may, if they choose to, make its death throes violent, and die with it, but they can neither check nor hinder a revolution that is a natural evolution of social progress.—l am, etc., Socialist,