By Our Trade Union Correspondent.
The publication in the Observer" of Lord Milner's four articles on the industrial situation in Great Britain has aroused great interest among Labour workers. Unlike the essays in journalism of most famous men they are as interesting from the matter they contain, as from the fame of their writer, for they show a grasp of the mind and outlook of the worker that must be unique among modern statesmen. It is evident that Lord Milner does not see,. as Winston Churchill does, a red revolutionary in every unemployed workman complaining about a system which is for the present dispensing with his labour. Nor does he, as do our Rothermeres, and Birkenheads, believe that the worker can be perpetually side-tracked by ''stunts"' from attacking the Capitalist system. And last and most important of all he has grasped the fact that the continual admonitions to the worker from our millionaire industrial magnates of the Weir type, that he should work longer hours and accept less wages, does more to create Communists than Conservatives. Reasonable people are hoping that these essays will mark the end of that kind of sensational anti-labour propaganda which has for so long sullied our press and given a cheap notoriety to shady politicians of the Bottomley type.
The pained surprise created in some political circles by Lord Milner's warm sympathy for the workers will not be shared by those who have made a close study of fis speeches and writings. He has always worked for constructive legislation to give the most exploited members of the community a fair chance of good food and healthy surroundings, and_ there are many Labour workers who still gratefully remember his wholehearted ce-operation in achieving legislative enactments to abolish sweating. In 1908 he pointed out in one of his best Speeches that, ''Patriotism is choked in the squalor and slums of our great cities," and in several of his famous speeches delivered at Toynbee Hall he has shown an increasing concern at the growing poverty of the worker in the midst of an enormously accelerated capacity for production. Lhe articles he has just written are only evidences of the fact that he is fearlessly pursuing his inquiries to their logical conclusion. Their strangeness to the present day reader arises from the contrast they make to the existing flood of reactionary publicity work. There is a statesmanlike dignity about them reminiscent of a hale gotten time when the art of government in England was not the hand-to-mouth maneuvring it has degenerated into since.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.