THE GREAT DIVIDE.

Inangahua Times, Volume XI, Issue 1703, 12 May 1886, Page 2

THE GREAT DIVIDE.

♦ Not the Great Lone Land, where Sitting Ball betd *way, tbe country of Uie big praiiies where loaaied countless herds of bisous, ao4 wbeie tbe moose deer was a present fccfc, the land told of by Lord Dunravtn, and painted by poor Val Bi'oraley. Nor that coanlry whither no man ooroeth or hath come *inoe tSraw&uig of the world. Not an artificial boundary like that gveut wa|l thrown up by the Chinese, or the division made a? a defence against the Picts by Agiicola. A.»d yet a human bonndavy, ooe impassable to tbe many, a division which indeed affects a separation, a fortiti nation which is truly impregu* able. And what is this Great Divide ?" It is the line of demarcation, invisible to Bt^ht, intangiole to touch, and yet impervious as adamant, the barrier between classes. It is a boundary which exists under every system of government, in the purest democracy where in truth " Demos " rules, uuder a constitutional monarchy, or under a despotism of iron, a one man power giindiug as that of the White Tsar. It is the question summed up in a few words, put as it was pat to the writer some few years since by an American friend, one who, like Ulysses, had seen men and cities, a cosmopolitan of cosmopolities. •• Here," it was said in the States, "as with you, the poor grew poorer day by day, and the rich grew richer." Never possibly in the world's history has three been a time when splendour and Bqualor were such near neighbours, when Dives and Lazarus so jostled one another in the highways aud byeways of life. It is but a step in many cases from the splendid square, with its lordly mausions, filled with treasures garnered in from every land, to the squalid slums, spawn beds reeking with the seeds of disease, seats of an ever-present, never-tonbe-satisfied hunger, nurseries of crime born of destitution and neglect. And in all our great cities what figure, cloaked from head to toot, holds the keys of all the creeds as surely as the grim phantom whose name is Death ? This spectre hovering near on every hand has many worshippers, who prostrate themselves as humbly before their idol as does the negro before his fetish ; and the name of the idol is Socialism. Extremes meet This fetish is a power in the Borne of to*day, in the Imperial City, thrice Mistress of the world, mistress by arms, by art, and by religion. The Papa-K* is now a monarch whose territory is restricted to the realm devised tor him by Edraoud About, " A palace, a church, and a garden." The son of the Be Galant'uomo reigns at the Quirinal over the United Italy made for his father by the plotting of Mazzini, the patience of Cavour, and the sword of Garibaldi. He reigns, but he does not govern. There is an imperium in imperio, a power higher than th« throne, a Cerberus to whom a sop has to be thrown daily. That power is the people. And what a power that is proves itself by one fact Despite that Italia Unita bears an old man of the sea on her shoulders in tbe shape of a crushing debt, of a standing army out of all pioportion to her population, in the City of Borne works are progressing thai find occupation for

30,000 men each day. This is the sop to Cerberus to silence the tongues of Irreconcilables who cry oat for Italia Irredenta, the bribe which J)olds id check the voices of the demagogues who would have a Republic from Alps to Appenines to grasp by the hand the proletariats of Paris, and raise a Universal Republic on the ruins of Church and State and Commerce. A far cry to Manhattan, and what do we read of Gotham ? Nightly drillings of Socialists, clubs well armed and better drilled, nightly training of a number of men affiliated together who, massed, exceed in nnmbera the entire State Militia, and utterly surpass these slippered warriors in discipline, Is there not the Great Divide here in the very heart's core of the commerce of America t The right to vote early and vote often is held of light account against the fact that street** by day and the Fifth Avenue by night tell of thousands gained and thousands spent. And and in this getting and spending the great body of the plebs have neither act nor part Democracy may seem to rule in the States, but Plutocracy governs, subject, however, not to the Constitution of the United States, but to the will of the Socialists. Arfd no one seems to. feel certain when they will say their Say, speak with arms in their hands. Herr Most has ranged himself. Then not alone in Pennsylvania but throughout the Union are the Knights of Labour, a body owning no allegiance save to their chiefs, and obeying blindly the orders of a Vehmgericht. c Then for the Fatherland. It was well for poets like Korner and Uhland to sing of a Vaterland massed in one, | to say you shall not take it, our Great German Rhine, that German men and German Rhine, German women and German wine, should German be for ever. It was possibly well to mediatise transparencies rather than to allow them to be subsidised, and their subjects sent off to fight with red Indians against colonists battling for their rights, or against Irishmen warring against their wrongs. Still it remains a moot question whether, after all, Germania was not happier in the old simple days than now when the man of blood and iron has worked his will— for it is his will. Holy Willy, the Kaiser of the German Empire, is but a puppet, a well drilled, well uniformed, well bemedalled puppet — and the milliards lying in the bank at Berlin were wrung from the stockings cf French peasants at the cost of the lives and blood of Wurteralierger and Bavarian, of Badner and of Saxon, of the dweller* in the Black Forest, the toilers on the Elbe, and the raftsmen on the Rhine. Prussia has won for the nonce, but she made a Great Divide in Germany. And the bridge over all this is Socialism. , iJt > As for Russia, when Alexander the Second*, to free himself of the saying of De Custine, that •' A Tsar walked to his coronation preceded by the murderers of his father, and followed by his own ;" when the son of Nicholas freed the serfs he did it not to benefit Ivanivanovitch, but to cripple the resources of the nobles. He succeeded ; but at what cost ? History has told of the Russian Frankenstein. The papers of the day tell hourly of the " polished perturbation, golden care" of the mler who lives in daily dread of even his most trusted intimates. The master of millions of men and millions of money is a veritable slave. A power more potent even than Socialism rules in holy Russia. It is a doctrine of negation — destruction in this life and annihilation in the next— Nihilism. In Belgium. How stand rival parties) The Clerics and Atheists artayed one against the other, the well-to-do standing for order on the defence, the proletariat, ready for the attack, watching a chance of loot. Denmark. Well, tub judice Us est. But if Socialism rules not in the old land of the Vikings who is the ruler f With us, we have lived for a long time in a fool's paradise. Some years since " slumming 1 ' was a rage ; it Was " quite too interesting " to be an amateur Lady Bountiful and go East. Nou* autres went there. But, despite sensational stories, sensationally illustrated, sensational plays, sensationally mounted, and poems that seemed to be written with tears of blood : despite all this, the toilers and the moilers, the Workers in the fever dens of the East, the bondsmen and bondswomen of the 4< sweaters," aye, of the understudies of the sweaters, took counsel. They held their meeting, the meeting of the unemployed. Then was the opportunity of such friends of labour as Hyndman, the wealthy dilettante of Portland place, and his camarade Champion, and of others. He who, to our delight, gave us an. •' Earthly. Paradise," and ornamented walls with a dado, wisely stuck to his artistic I paper making. Yet it is possibly well that, even at the cost incurred, thanks to a Flying Childors and a Fled Henderson, that London should know of the danger she runs by day, by uight, from hour to hour. The strongest portion of a chain is not a whit stronger than its weakest link. Let us hear a verdict from an independent witness, a foreigner, and, as a certain Lord Bacon has said, " the voice of foreign nations is the judgment of posterity." Gospodin Verestch«agin is one of the three living battle painters of the day, with Oaton Woodville and Edouard Detaille, Alphonse de Neu* ville has fought his last " Bourget." He, Verestchagin, has looked on death in the Caucasus; he has followed Kauffman and Skobeleff. seen the piles of dead round Plevna, knows the field of battle in alt its savage and civilised horrors. And this is what he says as an eyo-witness of the riots: "The conduct of the mob was horrible ; but,

at the risk of offendiagyoo, 1 shall add that I never saw human beings who looked 80 famished, degraded, ill-clad, and hideonsly miserable. Language is impotent to realise a man so brutalised by misery." And what says the Voltaire 1 "No city in the world hides such hideous social ulcers under the mantle of formalistic religion. No other city affords such a contrast of abject and hopeless poverty and excessive wealth. We have nothing in France comparable to St. Giles' and Whitechapel." A question the writer would query much. Let the Voltairian search the purlieus of Pan tin, visit Belleville (if he dare), or even stroll by the Canal St Martin within one hundred yards of the Column of the Bastille. It is our Tigers' Bay at is very worst When our French friend gets into " agglomerations of wealth at the West end and Bedford-square" he gets mixed. Yet^M t*t ab koste dooeri. It is well to be taught by a foe. And the fact of Black Monday, a reign of terror for days in imagination, should cell us that no temporary eleemosynary aid can effect any good ; but that men of every creed, party, and polities, who either wish well to their poorer brother or care for their own safety should, by voice, pen, and purse, endeavour to mitigate this present suffering, provide for future wants, and so each one, to the best of his ability, help each by a stone, a brick, a plank, to bridge over The Great Divide.