THE RIGHT TO STRIKE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 14 February 1913, Page 4

THE RIGHT TO STRIKE.

Mr G. K. Chesterton, writing in the Daily News and Leader in reference to the, railway strike of last December, expresses his entire dissent from tho dogma enunciated by so many of the British newspapers when commenting upon the famous Knox case, that the police are infallible. An honest mistake of identity or an incorrect deduction from evidence, he says, is no more impossible in the case of a policeman than of any other man, while perjury, arising out of spite or self-interest, is an ever-present-, cause of miscarriages of justice. Having disoosed of the infallibility of the police Mr Chesterton urges the Radicals to make no mistake at all about which side they are on when ten thousand common Englishmen c'aim an unquestioned right to protest against a most questionable legal system. "No democrat can deny that these railway men'nro citizens and not slaves," lie says, "and that therefore they are each and all free to throw up their work if they choose. That disposes of all the rubbish about an 'unauthorised strike.' "Who is going to 'unaut.horise' me to leave the service of this, newspaper if I choo.se? No democrat can deny that the railway men, as citizens, have the rieht to combine against the wrong done to a single citizen. • If we Radicals desert the democracy in such a struggle—wo desen-n to be in the House of Lords." The subsequent devclonments in the Knox case, while they did not, of course, prove either the correctness or the incorrectness of Mr Chesterton's theory of "the right to strike." substantiated his ooinion as to the fallibility of police evidence.