May 2.
European countries, May the First has been used as a day for demonstrations on the part of labourers for many years. The industrial classes their. efforts to improve their Jeconomie and social conditions utilize this day to bring before the other elements in the community their wants and needs Sometimes these demonstrations thave been little more than parades and speeches and the wear. ing of red rosettes. At other times, riots and other acts of violence ensued. To most Europen peoples, the first of May has always been a day of joy and festivity. Long before the world was filled with smoking chimneys and concrete buildings, with men and women labouring at benches or lathes, May Day was the delight of youth and the maypole the pivot of the folk lore of the people. Among all Aryan races, from, Russia to England, this festival of Spring, this holiday lof youth, when boy and girl danced in the fields with garlands of wild flowers, was celebrated as a welcome tothe season of loveliness and hopefulness. In the grimmer era in which we live, May Day has come to mean something quits different—a sort of day of hate, reminder of the class struggle, an accentuation of differences.
One sometimes wonders when ther there is not much which the foreigner imports into China which might not better have been left behind. Surely the May Day of Communes,.the May Day of class struggle and hatred, the May Day of the difference between man and man, might not have been imported. For, in the older China, men were on greater equality than we usually realize, ownership of land meant wealth and who did not own some piece of land? The passing of examinations established social position, and what poor Jad might not burn the midnight of to write an eight-legged essay? But China mu: Keep pace with the world, must have tall chimneys and roaring machinery. And with these come the crow@®ng of workers into factories, their urbanization, their dispossession as landowners and ultimately their massing into an industrial class, which everywhere and always complains against conditions as they are and seeks to improve its lot, not so much by individual initiative as by class action. During the past few year: Labour Day has been celebrated in China not so much by labourers as by students, not so much by the industrial classes by those who would utilize ithe industrial classes for political purposes. Perhaps nowhere in the world is capital as sympathetic with the aspirations of labour as in Shanghai. In fact, improvements in the conditions of the labouring classes ave usually not the results of strikes and labour troubles, but of the prescience of the managers of industries, who have had the foresight and big-hearted ness to anticipate the workers' demands. Whatever has been done to provide schools and hospitals for the workers, to give them better housing, to avoid the dangers of an already existent child labour system, has been voluntary on the part of the employers, many years in anticipation of the development lof the workers.
The injection of the Marxian idea of the class struggle into ithe industrial situation in China dates back only a year or two and cannot have percolated toi the workers themselves. It is rather a result of a world-wide discontent among certain intellectual groups, which may be "Chao Chun-nien in his stead. /attributed to the war and its most horrible concomitant, Bole shevism. The Marxian Socialist thinks in the most unnatural and unrealistic categories. He likes to call himself a realist, but he avoids the realities of life, with which he usually has only a bookish acquaintance, He, divides men into classes which are as clearly defined as {two-straight lines in a geometric equation, although in actual life, there are no such divisions, men living in families rather than in economic groups. Surely in China, such categories are untrue, for the family system in almost. pristine primitivity prevails. Here one may find among blood velations rich tuchuns and their serving men, cotton magnates and -riosha ' coolies, great bankers and small farm:
And all these human de-ings regard each other as brothers, take pride in the success of the one who rises, serve each other in the most helpful manner. To the Marxian s9- dalist, all this is unrealistic, although it exists, because the book requires that it should be otherwise, Never was a doctrine conceived as foreign to the psychology of the Chinese people and the social habits of the voce as the class struggle which Bolshevism is attempting to introduce into tis country.
On the other hand, in a period such as we witness now, when the Government altogether ignores the condition of the people, when currency is demonetized, when the ordinary safeguards to life and property aye lacking, the lower the economic status of the indivi dual, the more he is bound to suffer, The exploitation of the coolies by the militarists, the hounding of thousands of" men to do carrier services during a civil war without compensation, provide a splendid soil for the sowing of discontent and hatred, Whatever may be the errors of the labourer who strikes, it cannot be forgotten that he is usually on the margin of starvation, that he barely keeps body and' soul together. In a country, where taxation is whimsical rather than by due process of law, where the rich pay nothing and even the rice of the poor is taxed, it is not surprising that the workers sometimes break down under their load. But it is not against their employers that they should complain; it ix against that futility of motion which in China goes by the term, Government.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.