THE LABOUR MARKET.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3118, 9 July 1892, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE LABOUR MARKET.

Wo (Wellington Press) have on many oocasions urged that the heaviest sufferers from that state of insecurity produced by reckless raids on capital and capitalists were not the capitalists, but the working classes of both sexei and all trades and grades. The -world is wide for the investment of capitul, and when the owner of money finds that he is dealt with unfairly in one couutry, he simply removes his cash to more remunerative fields. He may undergo cansiderable loss, but his loss means, in the majority of instances, only a temporary cutting down of his expenditure on mere superfluities ; he endures no real hardship. The persons who have te bear the brunt of all the evil effects resulting from the insane war on capital are the very people in whose interests the political agitatois pretend to be fighting. We have just now a startlingly painful illustration of this in the terrible distress existing in Victoria and New South Wales where tons of thousands of the labouring classes, including many skilled artisans, are face to face with poverty in its most horrid shape. They are able and willing to work, but there is no work to do, and they are forced, in order to escape sheer starvation, to conic on the State for relief— to, in short, beg for means of subsistence.

This dearth of employment is not owing to the lack of work to be done, hut is a result, appallingly real, of the insecurity produced by the political " levellers. " There is .any abundance of money lying idle in the banks or else invested for short periods at low rates of interest, because the owners of it are afraid to embark in any of the manifold enterprises which, in young countries possessed of splendid resources, are ready to their hand, and in which, if they had any guarantee as to the future, they would be only too willing to engage, knowing well that their profits would bo at least a hundred per cent higher than they can make by lodging their money in bauks, cither at small rates of interest, or at no interest at all. Enterprise is frozen, and general stagnation, instead of universal industrial activity, prevails. Capital which is the wages of labour, instead of being employed in supplying work for men and women who are willing to toil, and to whom a condition of dependence on State charity is loathsomely repulsive, is looked up, because its owners are utterly uncertain aR to the future The effects of this paralysing stato of insecurity are felt all over the British colonies where, of late, the uprising of the spirit of extreme Radicalism has been more potentially manifested than in any other j part of the world.