THE GREAT STRIKES.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 352, 17 September 1889, Page 3

THE GREAT STRIKES.

THE DIFFICULTY NOW OVERCOME. London, September 14. The labor trouble is now believed to have been settled, a compromise to which both sides are agreeable having been effected. (FROM OCR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) Sydney, September 4The great strike of the London dock laborers is evoking great interest and is arousing the practical sympathy of the working classes to an extent which to a superficial observer would seem incredible. Men who speak most violently against any project for assisting British labor to emigrate, show themselves capable of making great sacrifices to assist it to achieve q stronger and more independent position at home. This is as it should be, and it goes far to redeem the anti-immigration movement from the charge of calculated selfishness which has been levelled against it. It is now very evident that it is only by maintaining the colonial standard of wages and comfort that colonial workmen arg gfiablgd to lend a helping hand to. their "struggling brethren on the other side of the world. A false cosmopolitanism urges them to throw down all barriers, to admit the free and unrestricted competition of pauper labor and pauper-made goods until all become paqpers together. But wou|d not such a course place them hopelessly and helplessly at the mercy of capitalists ? And are hot the latter taught by the self .dubbed prophets of ‘ political economy ’ from whom they take their oracles that they are doing a right and laudable thing ia grinding the faces of their workmen to the very quick ? It is qo doubt lamentable that there should' be strikes and similar convulsions. But the apathy and callousness of the ruling classes are such that they would allow a fourth of the population of London to starve, provided they would only do it in a way which would not interfere with their comfort, or crumple the rose-leaves on their Sybarite couches. A sense of sympathy under similar oppression brings prompt and willing assistance to. the London strikers from their fellow workmen all over the world- The reproaches of an awakened conscience in all in whom conscience is not yet dead, brings help and sympathy from members of therulingclasses. For years the condition of the London dock labourers has been a scandal to modern civilisation. And the powers that be have been content to hays it so. But after sitting on the safety-valve until an explosion is imminent, they are now beginning to be convinced that it is absolutely necessary to institute " a more satisfactory modus vivendi, Whet that will be, no one can at present say. But it will certainly be in the direction of exemplifying the great truth that the true intereets of capital and labor are at the bottom identical, and that unemployed lahar means unemployed capital, insuiUclonfiy ■ paid labor means uafemunSrstive 'employment j of | capital, And the subjiiv-*' _ ,J ; labororoflabo-’ J ’-"’I of ®»%al by '■ -«ans the destruction of both. tends so powerfully to u'ung, to national poverty, or individual ruin, as vast accumulation of unemployed capital? What tends more powerfully to bring abont briskness of trade, plenitude of employment and general prosperity than a well-paid condition of labor ? That a million men shall each have a pound to spend is obviously more conducive to the general good i than that one man should have a million pounds, Conversely, nothing tends so power- ' fully to bring about a depressed condition of the body politic as a badly paid, or half em- , ployed working class, Political economists tell us that wages always tend to the level of ’ bare subsistence. It follows, therefore, that i just as human application and ingenuity oon- - trive to resist the force of gravitation in other I matters, to prevent, for instance, the stately f palace from crumbling into a hopeless heap, ' so also they may hope to succeed in thia case’