MR. MASSINGHAM AND THE POPLAR QUESTION.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—I have read with great surprise the attacks which Mr. H. W. Massingham has made on Mr. Asquith in the Spectator of March 1st, and in another weekly journal, for daring fa raise the Poplar issue. Will your readers credit the statement that the Nation, under Mr. Massingham's editorsh;p, took the same serious view of the Poplar administration as Mr. Asquith has taken, and that it called upon the Labour Party to dissociate itself from the Poplar Guardians' policy? Mr. Massingham, as editor of the Nation, was responsible for the following in the issue of May 27th, 1922: "The real gravamen of the charge against Poplar is that the Guardians are attacking our ordinary wages system, and the distribution of wealth of which it is a part, by a process of sabotage. . . . The Poplar Guardians' way of rectifying bad distribution is the worst possible. It rallies all the forces of reaction most effectively against them, and gravely impedes every better method of redress. For it enables every Conservative in the country to point the finger of alarm and scorn at Labour administration. And they are justified in holding that, if a Labour Govern- ment were to administer the national resources on such a plan, it would spell ruin for every section of the community. For extravagant out-relief, though the worst of the Poplar vices, is not the only one. Waste and extravagance are everywhere manifest in the expenditure of public money.. . . Here is another radically wrong method of abolishing the present wages system. Add to these follies a really criminal slackness in revising cases receiving relief, and a refusal to take legal proceedings against persons for concealing their sources of income, and you have social irresponsibility carried to an extreme. Is this a foretaste of what Labour Govern- ment would mean if Labour came into power ? We do not believe it, but it is natural that every defender of things as they are should believe it. What is our Labour Party doing to dissociate itself from this bad administration of Poplar, and to make clear to the nation that its policy of social economic reform runs along quite different lines?"
When the Labour Government, in the person of Mr. Wheatley, showed that it was not dissociating itself from the Poplar policy, it was challenged by Mr. Asquith on grounds precisely the same as those which Mr. Massingham took in
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