A FALLEN IDOL.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2516, 1 June 1909, Page 6

A FALLEN IDOL.

While the workers of the Broken Hill mines are to be congratulated on having dispensed with the services of Mr. Tom Mann,, the victim is not to be greatly commiserated. Ho will doubtless 1 continue to fare well,' whilst tlio -miserable unfortunates who were weals enough to listen to his- “red rag” counsols arc compelled to make an appoal for funds t.o keep a roof over thenheads and food in their bodies. It is an old story—as old as humanity itself. Nor is the least old part thereof the distressing truth that, despite the countless exposures of the fallacy and rottenness of teachings which- profess to offer mankind a short cut to an industrial millennium, humanity is so constituted that each suceedmg tin ( rod” is taken to men’s hearts, and ted and clothed at their expense. It cannot too often be insisted that civilisation at its highest and best is not the product of any cut-and-dried State scheme of material reorganisation. It is as

Iron dug from central gloom, ' And heated hot by burning fears, And dipped in baths of hissing tears, And battered by tho shocks of doom, To shape and use. The man who declares he does not care under which flag ho lives so long as ho does livo; whose head is filled with wild hallucinations on the vastness or the sum of which Capital has despoiled him: and who pitifully appeals to the State to help him at every turn, is not of the stuff of which empires ar ; o made. The pilgrim fathers and early settlers of tho Otago settlement were of other heart and soul than these. Early arid late they worked and strove to save and build up this city of Dunedin. And their story is but the story of New England, of the Australian pioneers, of the Canadian Empire-build-ers, of many a South African farm. To-day we shirk work, we want somebody to regulate everything, we revile the, successful, and we decline to fight for a land that refuses to reward our incompetence and misfortune. Dunedin Star.”