TO THE EDITOR.
Sir,—My quotation from a journalist in your issue of June 3, on the subject of "preference to unionists," does not justify Mr. Greig in presuming that I endorse the sentiments expressed in the quotation, therefore all that he has written thereupon is irrelevant, and must be jettisoned. I quite understood, as your correspondent supposes, all that the worker claims to have secured as the "direct result of combination," and surely I need not repeat that with all his legitimate industrial aspirations and constitutional efforts to better his condition, I have the sincerest sympathy. He has every whit as much right to combine with his fellows as "the employing class" has for mutual advantage. Does Mr. Greig not see that much of what he says on trade unionism is little less than nonsense, and merely the parrot-like party cry of an extreme section of misled men who are striking a blow at the very centre of civilisation by the attempted substitution of brute force for reason ? There is unionism and unionism. The subject has a long history and is one that merits personal investigation. To go no further back than the seventeenth century, when John Locke wrote his famous "Treatise on Civil Government," we find that a labour theory of value had been formulated. Socialism (not as we now know it), which originated in England, returned to the land of its birth from Germany in the eighties, when it was prescribed in a new form by Karl Marx, for many years a refugee in England, and who based his well-known analysis of Capitalism upon English sources. Very much of the Socialist literature with which we are now deluged is nothing but a doling out or rechauffe of Marx's "Capital." It may be news, perhaps, to Mr. Greig, and of some little interest to your readers, when I say that an economist, Thomas Hodgkin, propounded pure Socialism in two popular pamphlets—"Labour Defended against Capital" (1825) and "The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted" (1832). William Thompson published in 1822 or 1824 his "Inquiry into the Principle of the Distribution of Wealth." Both these men were half a century before their time, however, as was also the first professed Socialist, Robert Owen. The Owenites were Socialists, and they gave to Socialism its world-wide name. In "The Poor Man's Guardian" (1835) Owen announced plainly the famous doctrine of "surplus value." The movement died out in England after the thirties, from several causes, which I will not tax your space to enumerate—chiefly owing to the collapse of Chartism and the Reform Bill of 1832 embracing such ameliorative legislation as the Factory Acts and the repeal of the Corn Law. The Socialism which had failed both in England and in France took root in Germany, and made rapid strides, was reintroduced into England in a systematic form by those two well-known Anglo-Germans, Marx and Engels. Reintroduced in the late seventies after the Franco-German war, and the collapse of the French Commune and the International, it at first made little progress. The first Socialist organisation was the Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1884, which originally counted amongst its members Messrs. Hyndman, John Burns, William Morris, E. Aveling (a son-in-law of Marx), and Belfort Bax. Then came, as the result of a split, the short lived Anarchist Socialist League, and finally, though of independent origin, the Fabian Society. The first and last, with the Independent Labour Party, the creation of Keir Hardie and others constitute now (Mr Greig will correct me if I am wrong) without enumerating small sections here and there, the three main Socialist bodies in England with their three organs, "Justice," "The Clarion," and "The Labour Leader." They differ from one another in matters of policy, or at least, did so until lately but they are all bent upon the overthrow of the present capitalist system and upon putting the producer in possession of the means of production and distribution.
But how? There's the rub! The Fabian Society condemns physical force and is for permeation and democratic constitutional means. The S.D.F. has been bitterly hostile to the F.S. and the I.L.P. This is an eloquent and significant sign. And in Australia there is not a little that we see and fear both as economists, patriots, and Christian Socialists. But this is only of a piece with our modern world. Civilisation itself is in jeopardy. History is for ever repeating itself. Man, as many a time before our own age, is trying to ignore God, and the annals of the past have demonstrated that to be a fundamental and fatal blunder both for the individual and for the nation. There is nothing new, alas in the present-day indifference of the masses towards religion, and the rationalism, practically atheism, and materialism of the second decade of the twentieth century. The exceptional features of the modern era are the new economic outlook of the educated man (not necessarily to be deprecated or depreciated) the violent aggressive revolt of labour an entirely novel and more comprehensive social structure and the ampler opportunities offered to the modem man for the cultivation of his sense life. Increased facilities of pleasure, philosophy itself ancient and recent, teach and promote selfishness and animalism, create an artificial and delusive life, rob man of the opportunities of entering into himself and holding converse with his soul and with God. It is the diabolical pace of our modern life that is killing the best within men. Much harm is being done by literature (!) of a certain class which finds too ready a circulation (showing the moral and mental plane of those poor creatures who lend it) and a nauseous journalism ("it pays") which spread ideas inimical to the spiritual—which are the highest—interests of humanity and which is sometimes frankly unclean, maligning and denying God and thereby degrading men. This makes, as all decent, thoughtful people know a tremendous almost resistless appeal to the uninformed and the vulgar. Far more dangerous, possibly because more refined and subtle is that kind of literature that tacitly disowns Christianity by adopting in its place a new paganism in which God is nothing, or, at least, negligible and man with animal limitations is all. The doctrine of sin is denied, and man is represented as the victim of a deterministic fate. This is R. Blatchford's latest evangel. Much otherwise fine work is marred by this false note. The marvellous material progress consequent on the conquests of science has led many to begin to fancy that man, the great discoverer, is all, and has become God, and material satisfaction has become the goal of existence. There is a Socialism that is Christian and there is a Socialism that is distinctly irreligious and anti-Christian. Hence, I wish to be informed what is the text book, and who the accredited author of the latest phase of socialistic teaching, by which my judgment and attitude may be determined so that, as I have already said, I may not err either by excess or defect. Why am I persistently denied this reasonable satisfaction? Mr Greig's persiflage—his frivolous bantering rejoinders (which are not replies,) innuendoes evasions, and turgid talk —are nothing to the point, and he knows it. I want to be in a position to deny on behalf of my Socialist Christian friends that Socialism is a popular exposition of the doctrines of Collectivism under one form or another, which amounts to a comfortable system of pooling the brain and industry of the country in the interest of the incapable and idle and other statements of a similar sinister character. If I may be pardoned for putting one article of my creed into rhyme, it would run like this:
The trouble I think, with us all,
Is the lack of a high conceit ;
if each man thought he was sent to the spot
To make it a bit more sweet,
How soon we could gladden the world
How easily right all wrong
If nobody shirked and each one worked
To help his fellows along
There would then be no just occasion for unfavorable criticising the more easily circumstanced members of the community, as the Rev. H. Dixon did in his sermon before the Anglican Synod in Brisbane on June 15. He pointed to the grave social unrest, and said that "one felt there is very good cause behind men when we are continually confronted with the grievous vanity, the wanton extravagance, the gross indulgence, the scarcely veiled sensuality of many of those who regard themselves as members of the most select social caste." To those involved in a censure like this I would earnestly say, noblesse oblige —I am, sir, &c.
T. J. MALYON.
June 27
brisbane courier24/7/1914,
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