June 3.
We hope that our readers have found as much interest in the articles by a trade union correspondent that we have recently been publishing as we certainly have in this' office. And because ignorance and misunderstanding are at the bottom of all the struggles between Labour and the rest of the nation, it is specially valuable to obtain the' clear insight into what the working-man feels and desires, which our correspondent has revealed. He shows the two great causes. which are working for unrest and even revolution: insecurity, the ceaseless dread of. unemployment and sickness; and! then the fiery unquenchable insistence of the few born agitators, over-educated, _greedy, cursed with too much imagination and too little balance, who capture the party machine (as indeed happens not only in Labour parties) by sheer perseverance in denunciation. It is easy to blame the workman for being led away by extremists. But how many of us would be wiser?
What is the answer to all the questions that our contributor puts before us? For it is not only. political interest and national self-preservation that demand an answer, but the most elementary principles of common justice and humanity. Natural ability can! never be reduced to a dead level.
The personal: equation can never be legislated against. But there is an increasing conviction in all classes that at least the chances in life's handicap should and could be more evenly distributed, and that it is the bounden duty of those of us who have been enabled by the virtues of our fathers! to get w good start in life to do what we can to remove the disadvantages of those who begin in the world weighed down by their fathers' sins. An extremely thoughtful and suggestive article' on these problems by Mr. J. A. Seddon, m.p., ex-Chairman of} the British Trade Union Congress, entitled ""A Sane Labour Programme' appears in the April "'Nineteenth Century." He makes no secret of the fact that "the vital and dangerous position to-day does not rest upon the personal worth of members of the Labour Party, but upon the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.