The news that comes in on every hand as to an improved outlook in both home and export trade is en couraging in the highest degree. It is also an answer to those advocates of Communism whose faint light feebly flickers in the British Isles. They were a nasty menace some short time ago with their ca' cairny policy and "go slow in production" pueachings and even to-day they have their following; "red'' literature is still spread pretty freely, in Scotland particularly, and children are being sent to Proletarian schools, I received a few/days ago a copy of the Election Address of Jeho Maclean (M.A.!), one of Scotland's foremost troublemongers in the industrial world. He stood for the Gorbals division of Glasgow as Communist candidate but was beaten by a Labour man.
The address is headed "To the Electors of the Gorbals Division, Glasgow, The Wage Slaves of Scotland and The Wage-Slaves of the British Empire."? and contains some illuminating passages "I stand in the Gorbals and before the world as a Bolshevik, alias a Communist, alias a Revolutionist, alias 9 Marxian," he says, "My symbol is the Red Flag, and it I shall always keep floating on high.'
Maclean went to gaol several times, and in 1921 '"'an old brute, Sheriff Boyd" gave him 12 months. The Sheriff, he states, was acting for the Lord Provost.
"When all empires are broken up and the workers by political control start to make land and wealth-produeing property common property, when of the Wealth produced all get' sufficient to give them life abundantly with leisure and pleasure and education added thereunto, then all the independent workers' republics will come together into one great League or Parliament of Communist Peoples, as stage towards the time in the future when inter-marriage will wipe out all national differences and the world will become one."
As an offset to this utterance another of John Maclean's leaflets voices a claim for Scottish Independence; it is scarcely consistent with his vision of an united world!
So much for John Maclean. It was good to learn from Glasgow the other day that one of the reddest of "'red'' papers there had failed for want of funds.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.