The Temuka Leader. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1890. THE RAILWAYS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2099, 16 September 1890, Page 2

The Temuka Leader. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1890. THE RAILWAYS.

The Eailway Commissioners have dismissed the four leading members of the Eailway Servants Union. We have not the slightest hesitation in prophesying that not only will these men be reinstated in their former positions, but that they will remain in the Eailway Service long after the Commissioners have been kicked out of it. From the first day they took office to the present hour these three Commissioners have net done one single sensible thing in the management of the railways. People now rail at the railway employes for forming a union, but who drove them to it ? The Commissioners, instigated by Sir Harry Atkinson. Sir H. Atkinson has a fad about compulsory insurance, and he got the Commissioner* to try to compel the railway employes to insure, This act of aggression on the part of the Commissioners forced the employes to i unite, and the Union was the result. If the Cemmissioners had not tried to coerce the railway servants into compliance with Sir Harry Atkinson’s pet Insurance Scheme, there never would have been a Eailway Union, and the Eailway Service would not have been demoralised as it has been by insane and vexatious mismanagement. Now, who are the dismissed men ? They are the very men who have kept the railway employes from striking all along. That is a simple fact. They are also the men who went to Wellington a few months ago and beat the Commissioners at the Conference. They are simply the four principal men, who have all along formed the Executive of the Eailway Servants Union and prevented a strike. It is useless at present to go into the right and wrong of the dismissal of these men. Feeling runs high, and to try to reason the whole affair out, and trace it from cause to effect, would serve no good purpose. “ Persuade a man against his will, and he will be of the same opinion still,” applies in this case. There is, however, one matter which ought not to pass unnoticed. Mr John McKenzie in his place in Parliament last Friday said the railway employes would take revenge on the Commissioners by striking during the grain season. We do not believe a word of it, and we think it a very injudicious thing for Mr McKenzie to say. The railway men have been sorely tried all along. The Commissioners have done their best to make them strike, but they have not done so, and we feel sure they will not do it in the grain season. The fact is they will have nothing to strike for, because everything will be settled and the men reinstated in office long before that time. The people of this Colony will not allow the Commissioners to do anything which would involve the risk of a a railway strike in the middle of the grain season, and will insist on the men being reinstated long before then.

We should, however, advise Messrs Maxwell & Co. to look for other filets. They will not outlive the statutory limit of their official existence.

TIIEy WOULD NOT STRIKE. If unionists and anti-unionists were but half so non-combative as the present Government we should have had no strikes. They are setting a splendid example to strikers. First of all they brought down their estimates, and the skinflints proposed to reduce them by £50,000. That motion would have been regarded as one of no confidence by any ordinary Government, and to put it in now-a-day language an ordinary Government would have struck if it had been carried against them. What did Government do? Did they strike? Not they. They simply voted for the motion with the skinflints and carried it, and stuck to their seats. Then item after item was ruthlessly cut down, till some of the heads of departments were crying but that they could not carry bn with the amount of money voted for them, and the civil service began forming a union for self-protection. Any ordinary Government would have struck at this, but our Government took it philosophically and submitted to it all. Then they came and reinstated on the supplementary estimates the items which the House had already struck off, and Mr Goldie gave notice that he would move a vote of censure on them for doing it. Mr Ballauce asked them would they treat this as a no confidence motion. They said they would not, but would take back the supplementary estimates if the House wished it. They would do anything but strike, and that they would not do. Thus from beginning to end they have submitted to be kicked, and brow-beaten, and humiliated, and degraded in every possible way, and they have born it all with the resignation of Saints. No yankee statesman ever altered his “ sintimints ” to suit the varying moods of popular clamor more readily than our Government, and thus they have set a splendid example to persons who are in too great a hurry to give up their billets. They have shown how they can eat the leak and stick to their billets. We believe that if they are re-elected no power except physical force, such as Cromwell once used, can eject them from office, so their constituents ought to think twice before sanding them back. THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES. With regard to the present difficulty our policy from the beginning has been like that adopted by the Lyttelton Times, that is, do all in our power to promote peace and a speedy settlement of the strike. Some people do not like this. They would like the unions to be cried down. We have to tell these people that such a course is a very dangerous one. Nothing is so well calculated to drive men to acts of violence as to be abused and slandered when their feelings are aroused. Sensible men always throw oil on troubled waters; fools foment bad blood and mischief by indulging in violent partisanship. We are glad to notice that the Otago Daily Times, a'most Conservative, pamper, takes our own view of the matter. After reading the ravings of the Press and its echo the Timaru Herald the following, from the Otago Daily Times of the 11th, will be found refreshing. “Looking for a moment beyond the ,nearers aspects of the world-wide industrial war to its ultimate issues, nobody who has any faith in human nature and the progress of the race can doubt what those issues must be. Capital will not crush labor, nor labor subjugate capital.If there tire fanatics on either side who are pressing on the war la hope of such a result, they are foredoomed to disappointment. The lesson that it seems the mission of Unionism to teach ua—a lesson which doubtless we very much needed to learn —is this, that organised labor is a power of equal rank with capital, and must ba reckoned with on that basis. Supplementary to this lesson is another, at present being burnt into our intelligence by the losses and sufferings of the strike—that each of these co-ordinate powers is capable of iuflictings as great injuries as it receives. When these truthea are once thoroughly learned —as soon or late ihey must be—the era of strikes will be past. This goal may ba distant, but it is certainly in sight. .Moreover, the development of unionism js decidedly a step on the road to it. Up to the present time, “Unionism” has sounded in the ears of the capitalist as a note of war; it is destined to become the watchword of peace. What ifl wanted ia unionism on both sides—the complete organising of labor on the one band and of capital on the other. Not until this is effected can we look for the beginning of just and atab'e relations between them. Were each of the two great industrial factors a solid unity, conflict between them would be < quivalent to the dissolution of sopiety itself, in other words would be impossible, Neither can exist without the other; neither can deslroy the other ; they must perforce fiad a modus vivendi."