The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-09-28 00:00:00

THE LABOUR QUESTION IN AMERICA.

The Nation, pointing out to the Americans the
danger of playing tricks with the labour question, and
its observations are not by any means inapplicable to
this country, says :

We hear (it says) a great deal of the wrongs of the work-
leg man, but those who talk about them resolutely refuse to
say in what way they ought to be and can he redressed by
legislation Wn are told that the workiug man ought to have
more leisure, but how he Is to have more leisure without Its
costing him anything nobody reveals We are told that he
ought to have higher wages, but all the orators led writers
refuse to give us a draft of the bill by which more wage. are
to be supplied. Imteed of this, we are treated month after
month to vapid declamation, iminuatieg and thinking and
suggesting, rather than openly asserting, that there is &Mlle sort
of legislation called for by justice and humanity which would
give the working man his rightful social position, hut which
the Government withholds The worst of it is, that it is not
solitary raving orators or irresponsible editors only who do
this. It has become within a few years a regular practice of
party conventions. A "labour plank" is now an essential
portion of tvery platform, whether State or national; the
labourers, or the "servants of civilization," as the Phila.
delphia platform called them, are gradually taking the place
of the 'tiddlers and sailors" as objects of the enthusiastic
homage of politicians. Republicans would do well to re-
member that all the questions which occupy the public
mind at this moment, grave and Important as they are,
are mere passing trines compared with the lalieur ques-
tion. They will all probably be well nigh forgotten in
ten years, but the labour question will remain, and will he
ten or twenty years hence, as it is now, the most tre-
mendous question with which the modern world has
had to deal. We cannot afford to play tricks with it either In
America or aeywhere else. There are plenty of men—and
senstele and sober men toe—who believe that it contain.
the disease of which this Christian civilization of ours is to
perish ; that the passionate pursuit of equality lI condi-
tions on which the multitude seems now entering, and the
elevation of equality of conditions into the rank of the
highest political good, will eventually prove fatal to art, to
science, to literature, and to law and that after having
gone down into barbarism, and witnessed the decay and
destruction of all the great monuments of our own epoch,
we shall have he begin again the old and toilsome ascent
made by our forefathers under the lash of hunger and the
rule of trate force.
This is a pretty dark view (remarks the Pall Mall
Gazette). It has not, adds the Nation, perhaps enough
support in actual social phenomena to make us melan-
choly, but it certainly has enough to make ns sober and
careful. The Nation forgets that sobriety and careful-
noes are in the present day incompatible with the con-
ditions of political life. The world is ruled by office
seekers and their organs, who exercise as great an in-
fluence over the community as the Roman Catholic
priest exercises over the Irish people. Office seekers
must outbid each other in order to obtain the sole object
of their ambition ; they, therefore, IL it only trifle with
the labour question, but with all other questions affect-
ing the public interests. To rule without a policy is to
steer without a compass, and where we shall have
drifted to in ten years' time under the guidance of
modern statesmanship is beyond the power of man to
divine. Perhaps woman might be able to enlighten
us, but although she is eloquent enough on some points
she io reticent on this.