MR WILSON AND THE UNEMPLOYED.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2395, 13 August 1892, Page 3

MR WILSON AND THE UNEMPLOYED.

TO THE EDITOR. Sni, —I thought you were ill treating Mr Wilson by keeping him so long from being heard in his own defence. But it is a very lame defence he offers when lie is heard. It is of no moment whether it was him that spoke to Constable Hilliard or Constable Hilliard that spoke to him ; the fact remains that four men were deluded into coming 150 miles to do work at an un remunerative price. Bevryoue who knows anything about workknows perfectly well that no man could earn as much as would pay for decent food for himself by cutting, grubbing, and burning a twoyears’ growth of gorse at 7d a chain, to say nothing about tools, no inconsiderable item on stony land like Allandale. Those who know Mr Wilson will not accuse him of laziness, but he need not try to persuade us that hard work at a price that would scarcely procure food for a single man would ever procure the broad acres of Allandale for him. He should try a few chains of his gorse himself, and calculate how long it would take him to pay off his mortgage at the rate of wages he would make even atlOdachain, which he thinks too much. There are men like the one he tells of who drank his £l2, etc., a curse to themselves and all working men, and a great convenience to the lovers of cheap labor, as they can always at any price when their guzzle is over. If Mr Wilson would give fairly remunerative wages for work he could get plenty of working men as sober, and able, and willing to work as ever he he was. If he expects such men to work for nothing, or what is next to nothing, he is expecting too much. Respectable working men and their families have not learned to live-on nothing yet. Willie Harrow said —after he had tried to learn his horse to live on nothing—-that he had him learned to live on one straw a day when he died. If capitalists and large landholders persist with their present policy they will soon find that working men will go the same road, i.e., they will cease to be drudges for the benefit of others. There is an educated class arising who will not be so easily hoodwinked as we and our fathers have been. They will not be over-awed with a piece of parchment, and the signature of a dead tyrant. When such men as Mr Wilson are allowed to have only as much land as they can plough, and sow, and reap, and mow with their own hands, they will hay?, no trouble ydth t}mir employes. When every man puts his own g'qrs'e, there will be no trouble about the price of labor. These men who are anxious to compel working men to work for nothing, ftiu] abuse them for not paying their way, are doing far more to hurry on the so-called nationalisation of the land they are so much afraid of, than Mr Ballance and his colleagues are.—l am, &c., Working Man.