THE RIGHT TO WORK.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,-011 reading the letter under the above caption in your last issue it occurred to me to send you the views of an Australian employer of wide experience. He is one who has occupied a prominent and honoured place in the struggle on behalf of free labour ; one who is esteemed even by opponents. In a recent letter he says he has been " Slowly forced to the conclusion that until a vast majority of our community is seriously hurt there is not much use in fighting against the political developments of the last twenty-one years in Australia and New Zealand as some of us have been doing. We do not succeed in convincing the people of their folly, and we shall not succeed until they are seriously hurt. Whether, when that time arrives—and I do not think it is very far off—we will be able to get back on to the straight and narrow way or not remains for the future to ciecide, but I do think the sooner it comes the better will be our chance of recovery, while our absolute and complete failure might on the whole be a good thing for the older countries like Britain. We have gone faster and further than they have done, and when we go over the precipice they may be in a position to draw back, although I do not think they will. Britain is now at the same point as we were at twenty years ago. We won our first great fight and maintained freedom of contract as Britain has done, but we have not secured the victory in the end. The positions are strikingly similar. The stand taken by Lord Devouport is exactly the same as we took. We won, as he has done, in spite of a Government which acted the part of ' Mr. Facing-both-ways,' as the Asquith Government has acted ; but now, after twenty years' effort, all has gono for nothing, and we have 'preference to unionists' as the openly proclaimed policy of the Commonwealth Government."
Similar opinions are held by some of us who have little concern for party politics, but who have the very deepest concern for the future of the British people as a whole.—I am,
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