[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR].
SIR,— -The letter from the editor of the Daily Herald in the current Spectator is interesting, if only because of that conflict of values which is the essential weakness of the extremists of the Labour Party. Mr. Fyfe speaks of " the Golden Rule of Christ," and apparently accepts the Gospel teaching as Socialism in excelsis ; yet he refuses evidently to cast-the beam from his own eye, that he may the more clearly see how to " pluck out the mote that is in his brother's eye." Mr. Fyfe says company management has put " industry into the hands of men who can only keep their jobs if they satisfy their share. holders with large dividends " ; forgetting altogether the parallel postulate, that it is only by fomenting trouble and ill-feeling in the ranks of labour against employers that the extreme Labour leaders can hope to keep their own jobs and salaries. Mr. Fyfe must try to be fair all round.
What is most wanted is not men to increase acerbity, but on both sides men of good will to help to bring conflicting ideals into harmony ; and if reasonable and fair-minded men so meet, they will find that human beings have more in common than in divergence, and that merely to emphasize exaggerated class distinctions is futile. Many, very many men,- as is well known to those handling industrial problems, are, if only
afforded reasonable opportunity, ready and willing to join bailiffs with all who seek to restore British industrial life to pre-eminence of place.
Mr. Fyfe, Sir, ventures the assertion that all your readers are old. I wonder if he himself was:ever-young, or has the young
heart ? So many keen reformers never see the wood for the trees. It is the ordinary people of the country who constitute the driving force, those of all classes who do the work ; and it is they who even now want to come together—not the experts in Capitalism or Communism, who in the main are of narrow outlook, and only confuse and destroy.—I am, Sir, &e.,
ha) DSTRIALIST.
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