17 SEPTEMBER 1921, Page 2

The Trade Union Congress at Cardiff on Thursday, September 8th,

adopted a resolution in favour of disarmament, after a heated interchange of personalities between some Com- munist delegates—one of them a boilermaker—and Mr. J. H. Thomas. Next day the Congress rejected, by a card vote of about six to one, a resolution in favour of settling industrial disputes without recourse to a strike. It is sad to find that most of the Labour leaders, who advocate peaceful methods ot settling international quarrels, are reluctant to apply the same admirable principle to industry. Mr. Smillie, for example, who poses as an ardent Pacifist, denounced the resolution against strikes as " reactionary," and said that " there would have to be fighting in the future as there had been in the past." We cannot understand why, if it is immoral to fight another nation, it should be perfectly right and proper to wage war on your fellow-countrymen as the miners did last spring. It is note- worthy that nearly a million votes were cast, even at the Trade Union Congress, for industrial peace.