Pioneer

I Sir Edgar's Motto. SIR EDGAR JONES, the Coalitionist candidate for Merthyr, has discovered two electiod cries of which he is so proud that he has had them panelled in the centre of the inside pages of his election address. They are: Vote for Perform- ance, not Promises," and Be Patriots, not Partisans." Since Sir Edgar does not pause to point out how anyone becomes less of a patriot by reason of partisanship, we will leave the second with the mere observation that in all probability Sir Edgar would be the last to deny that the members of the Seamen's and Firemen's Union had proved unpatriotic by reason of their partisanship in the policy of Mr. Havelock Wil- son. At all events the question is an extremely open one which we should answer differently than Sir Edgar, and to which we shall return elsewhere if space permits. But for the mo- ment we are more concerned with his first effort: Vote for Performances, not Promises," a sentiment with which we so heartily agree that we propose to examine Sir Edgar's position by it, to discover whether it may not have ap- plications other than that of covering the Mer- thyr Coalitionist's paucity in election address de- finite promises other than that of supporting the charlatan "Wizard"—Lloyd George. It is Sir Edgar's misfortune that his addresses of past elections in Merthyr have been so obviously ephemeral productions that we have been unable to find anyone who possesses one. In this, Sir Edgar differs widely from our late member, Keir Hardie, whose election literature is trea- sured by hundreds in the town who differed widely from him politically. As we were not privileged to he anywhere near Merthyr during the last General Elections, we are, therefore, at a disadvantage insofar as we cannot compare the promises that Sir Edgar then made with his subsequent performances, and although Sir Edgar, in his new bon mot, specifically warns us against such a comparison, still it is neces- sary, if we are to get anywhere, that we should have some understanding of his last position. Since he was returned as the Liberal Member of a Borough with the Radical tradition of the Merthyr Boroughs, and since he is confessedly a disciple of Lloyd George, it will not be too much to assume that at the last General Elec- tions Sir Edgar was extremely annoyed over even the mention of any description of tariffs or preferential treatment; that he was a standard bearer in the van of Welsh Disestablishment; and that the shameful treatment of Ireland brought the flush of indignation to his cheek, and torrents of burning words of condemnation of Carson and the anti-Home Rulers to his lips. He probably also was a sworn enemy of the Lords; and a ruthless protagonist of the ex- propriation of the pheasant-inhdbited lands of the wealthy. But those last are more remotely conjectural than the first three assumptions we have made, and upon which alone we depend. We are taking it for granted that in his pro- mises to the electorate these three main planks of the pre-war Liberalism should be furthered by every ounce of effort that he could call forth; and that he would scarcely sleep a'nights until the glorious principles of a free and happy Erin; a titheless Church of Wales, and a silenced-for- ever Birmingham crowd were the happy results of Chiozza Money's statistics, Lloyd George's Limehouse addresses and Edgar Jones' votes on divisions. Those were the promises—promises that evoked the cheers and votes of thousands lof Merthyr men because they represented their ideals, their most sacred principles—principles that the war has done nothing to fundamentally change. Now let us look at the performance as the Edgar Jones of the 1918 election exhibits it. Gone are the burning words of zeal over the sor- rows of Ireland. That splendid principle is whittled down to the sentence "The Govern- ment of Ireland must be settled," which may mean anything the elector cares to read into it; Free Trade, that sacred principle that came down from Adam Smith and the Classical econo- mists as the birth-right of modern Liberalism, that had inspired the Party's greatest heroes— Cobden and Bright, is severely left alone, except by inference, for we know from the unqualified support which the candidate promises to Lloyd George that he is committed to the retracting of his own most cherished principles of 1910, at least so far as "key industries" and preferen- tial treatment are concerned, and all who have endeavoured to find out the political definition of a key industry have come away surprised ut the elasticity of the phrase. -Welsh Disestab- lishment, too, has faded away so palpably that it also is prohibited entrance into the Coalition- ist's address, but again the Georgian vagueness may be taken as covering the Georgeian pro- tege. Such is the performance, a performance of casting off the principles of the past, and re- clothing himself in the garments which in 1910 were described with all the imagery that the ne- gative terms of oratory could conjure up. As a performance we lerfve it to the Liberals of Mer- thyr for what it is worth in their estimation. But probably Sir Edgar did not mean us to take his words quite as we have. He might have meant that as the Labour Party had always been so small it was an untested party of pro- mises. Of course, the answer to that is the policy of the Party, its logic and synthesis; and the great many things that organised Labour has secured with even its small representation. Still Sir Edgar would be indiscreet in placing any such meaning on the phrase he has conjured forth, for he cannot forget that he was the col- league of a Labour member who also made pro- mises, and performed deeds. Can any elector, be his political complexion what it may, imagine a deed of Hardie's that contravened any princi- ple that he had enunciated-; can any person who ever knew or heard Hardie imagine him jet- tisoning the political faith for which he gave his life ? If Hardie could not translate that faith into a glorious reality it was not his fault, but the fault of the ignorance of the mass of the people—an ignorance fast disappearing thanks largely to his work—and lie would at least hold it as a reality and not as a mere figment to be changed and chopped and even exchanged for its opposite. If it is performances that Mr. Jones wants, let him convince the electorate of Dowlais that the dispised and rejected Party that Hardie called into being and of which he was the personal embodiment did not advantage them in their great wage fight, and not they alone, but thousands of others. Let him find the man, woman or child that found Hardie's pro- mises of effort towards their betterment broken in his performances. Performance for perform- ance we challenge comparison. And we remind the Merthyr electorate that they have again an opportunity of speaking their appreciation of all that Hardie stood for, and his splendid sincerity, by voting for James Winstone, whose perform- ances on behalf of the people we also invite scrutiny of. Sincerity, truth to principle, and agreement of promise with performance, those are the things which Labour offers to Merthyr in the person of Winstone.

The Indefinites. IF commonscnse has failed to reveal to the electorate of the South Wales constituencies the political immorality of the Georgian demand of a "blank cheque" from all "certified" candi- dates, the poverty stricken nature of those can- didates' election addresses must have adver- tised the fact to all who have received them. A more complete confession of being hopelessly lost and compassless upon dark and unchartered waters than these documents display it would be difficult to find anywhere. The truth is that the tame Georgian-Liberals, who have been called upon to imitate their master-clowns back- ward somersault into Toryism, have been left so dazed by their deed that they have not yet had time to conjure up sophistries that might pass as principles during the brief fortnight of a "snap" election. The consequence is that we are to-day expected to swallow all sorts of ex- tremely vague allusions to the press-ing problems of the day, woven around a plaintive "Trust George blindly as we do motif. We are told that the Coalition Government is determined to treat the returned warrior aright, that the na- tions gratitude to our soldiers is recognised to the full, but when we measure the fact by the unseemly haste with which this election has been forced upon the country to the exclusion of the very men whose claim upon the nations gratitude is so fulsomely noted, we cannot help but feel that even in their vagueness the Coalitionists have been extremely ill-advised in their choice of themes. The still graver problems that every elector recognised months ago as calling for a strong and definite policy, moulded upon a foun- dation of sound principles, are invariably treat- ed with such lightness that they may but be re- garded as having been introduced to fill space by men so completely barren of message that without such utterances they would have been compelled to a silence as profound as the grave. Trust George is the first and last despairing wail of political nonenities whose sale of princi- ples either attests to a previous insincerity in political profession, or an ignorance of those principles that could be disguised under a wel- ter of words in the uncritical times of pre-1914. But those times are gone now. A deep political education has marked the war-period, an edu- cation that necessarily and naturally grew out of the increased duties that the war forced upon the Government. The spurious political coin that it had been possible to pass off upon the people so long as Parliament was a mere House of talk, became impossible of currency after the State had been forced to defend the people by active interference on the plane of every-day affairs where the profiteer had to be checked, ere he bled the nation white; and the insufficiencies of commercial anarchy corrected by the adoption of a filleted "State Socialism, a Socialism that failed because it was not complete or courage- ous enough: That active interference has served a useful purpose in opening the eyes of the peo- ple to the potentialities of the State machinery used aright. It may be that the awakening has been too recent to allow all to retain their vision against the fever of spurious patriotism, the in- noculation of which constitutes the Coalitionists only hope of gaining the green benches of West- minster. But even should that method succeed, the reaction will be powerful to-morrow, when the new-found vision returns stronger than ever to the people, and they will sweep away the sham government that they will then have. But personally we do not believe that the new vision will be lost. The problems of to-day and to- morrow are universally recognised as calling for determined men, and no men are determined who so obviously Iiek tli4, grasp of principles as do the South Wales Coalitionist candidates as evi- denced by their own election addresses. Labour alone has the definite policy that can inspire de- termination in its representatives, and because of that thousands who otherwise would have been years before they forsook the old and de- caying camps to march with the army of pro- gress have now swallowed their obj<xtions, many of them purely imaginative, and have cast in their lot with Labour.

Contemptible. I A CONTEMPTIBLE attempt has been made at some of the meetings of the Merthyr Coalition candi- date to play upon the religious prejudices of the electorate by the declaration that the Labour Party locally had spent a Sunday in addressing election literature to soldiers in France and Flanders. This charge possesses the humour of ludicruit), ooming as it does from a platform that has broken every code of political honour that constitutional development has bequeathed to us. and that has consented to the blind sale of its independence and principles as a condition precedent to official sanction of the Tory camou- flagers. If this was entirely a party matter we should be inclined to leave such contemptible subterfuges for vote catching to the righteous condemnation -of a liberal minded electorate, such as the Merthyr electorate cannot help from being by reason of its long and honourable con- nection with the advance guard of political de- mocratic progress from Chartist days, through Richards to Hardie. but we are aware that even in such a broad-minded constituency as ours the crude narrowness of Sabbatarian prejudice is not altogether absent, and this hateful section-- which loves nothing hotter than an opportunity to demonstrate that in the strict letter of the law it is not as other men are—may use this offence against individual meml>ers of the Labour Party. in order to protect individual members from the unsavoury clutches of this repellant typo we have therefore thought it better to present the true facts of the charge, the substance of w hi<eh is accurate. The letters were addressed on Sunday by members of our Party. But look at the reason, for ours being a Party that has always opposed Snndav work needs a reason before engaging in it. The lists of addresses and particulars necessary for the despatch of the literature to soldier voters—and who would question their right to the fullest possible freedom to receive the literature of every Party and to exercise their franchise ?— was in the possession of the officials at the Town Hall from whom they had to be obtained. Those necessary documents for reasons totally un- known to us were not available until an hour before midnight on Saturday, and were then only at the disposal of the Party on condition that they were returned to the Town Hall by noon on Monday, a condition which was honour- ably fulfilled by their return an hour and a half before that time. When. then, could the work be doti(-,? Obviously only on Sunday. Those an.' the facts that are being warped in the hope that the warping will mean votes for a Coalitionist—than which we know no more con- temptible description. The tactics are worthy of the cause they are dragged into the service of a cause that stinks in the nostrils of every man of rectitude and principle, no matter what Party he subscribes to. That they will serve that cause we do not fear. The politically blind- est elector can deduce from the attempted use of such a charge the bankruptcy of the Party which uses it, and will know how to reply to it.

lshipping and The Cardiff Election. I As J. H. Thomas pointed out in his week-end speeches at Cardiff, the invasion of the three City divisions by Labour has succeeded at all events in producing a confession of the common cause of Liberal-Tory-and-Coalitionist against the workers' party on the part of the "Western Mail." Mr. Thomas called this call to unity- against-a-common-foe a blunt admission, but to our reading of one day's edition of our con- temporary the wail seemed to savour more of hysteria than of any of that open outspokenness that the word" blunt" calls to mind. Upon no other assumption can such ridiculous state- ments that the State monopoly of shipping would mean an end to the enterprise of the British mercantile marine be explained—or rather there is an alternative to which we will return after dealing with this' question of the strangling of enterprise by statification. Had we been living in Elizabeth's day when the men of Devon builded their ships, sailed them them- selves, and pocketed the proceeds of their piracy on the Spanish main, we might have been con- vinced that the management, and control of our mercantile marine was dependent upon the per- sonal ability and enterprise of individual ship- owner. It is to those days that the economics of the writer in our contemporary rightly belong. But we have progressed a few centuries in time, and a millenium in economics. The owners of shipping to-day, have, for the most part, neither seen the ships or the offices of the company in which they are shareholders, and from which they draw dividends. The whole concern of such owners is that the money invested in British ships shall show not less than the average yield on Capital," and it was to get more out of the shipping game than this that the Plim- soll line was altered to the detriment of the sailor, and the endangering of his life; and it was to still further secure the dividends of the dry-land mariner whose enterprise consisted of orders to his stock-broker to sell out, or attempt to sell out, any shipping shares that were un- profitable when compared with the average in- vestments that the British merchantmen were ing ousted from his job by the employment of Chinese coolies and Lascar sailors. The conten- tion that such men are responsible for the pre- eminent plaoe that British shipping held on the seas of the world is a travesty of all the find- ings of investigators into the phenomena of capitalist economics who tell us that: "the domination of British shipping is partly due to native ability, partly to the geographcal position and advantages of the United Kingdom, partly to the free commercial policy which has made her a free market for all the world's commodi- ties, partly to the extraordinary advantage of coal exports and partly to the restrictive com- mercial policy of some other nations, notably the United States," which possesses greater na- tural advantages than us, and the coming evolu- tion of which will seriously challenge our position under Capitalism, mind you, if allied to a saner commercial policy stimulated by the Panama canal. What mention is there in that picture—taken from a modern text book on na- tional wealth—of the transcendant ability which the Western Mail finds in the shipowners. Will nationalisation take away our natural abil- ity destroy the indentations of our cost, desic- cate the Thames, the Bristol Channel, the Mer- sey, the Clyde, the Firth of Forth, and the Tyne; alter our fiscal system; denude us of coal (vr exportation, or play any part in the con- tinuance or discontinuance of the past restric- tive policies of foreign states? Such questions disclose the ridiculous nature of et-he "Western Mail's" concern for the enterprise which it is claimed is incompatible with State control but we prefer to think tha.t it was honest concern, than to imagine that the only reason for the attacks on Labour were the absolute absence of the rnatel-ial with which to make out a seeming- ly reasoned case against Labour's demand in this matter—which is the alteirnatvio to which we referred above. There is no pleasure in winning over an opposition which has no sort of a sensible sounding case.

A Tribute to Nicholas. THE splendid tribute that is paid to the work of the Rev. T. E. Nicholas amongst the agricul- tural labourers and rural workers of West Wales fly an official organiser of those workers is one that should have a marked effect upon the re- doubtable Glais candidature in the Aberdare constituency. We fear that our comrade will suffer in his fight from the fact that he is what he is—a parson. To the great mass of the peo- ple Holy Orders are incompatible with trade union agitation and organisation, or sustained industrial activity of any kind. Such people do not know T. E. Nicholas, who has ever tinctured his promises of better things in a better land, with the prac/tical advocacy of means whereby the mundane world might be made a little more in the image of that realm flowing with milk and with honey which has been so often figured forth as our abode after death. And in that task of social improvement he has ever pushed forward, the work of industrial combination. pioneering in the work more often than not, for he has clearly seen that the real danger to the community is not its Bolshevists" but its masses of underpaid workers, whose wage never rising above the subsistence level depressed those workers into a sub-human world of ignor- ance and misery, breeding a Frankenstein that would if left to itself ultimately rise in its madness of horror and animalism and de- stroy, without any plan of reconstruction, the system tiiat had given it existence. But he has engaged in the work amongst the agriculturists and others from more immediate practical rea- sons that should appeal to every trade unionist in Aberdare. Whilst the ^liners and others in their organisations have been slowly coming to see that their only danger lay in the existence of an illpaid sub-stratum of workers who could be drawn by the promise of higher remuneration into the better paid industries and used for the purpose of opposing the organised workers in their advance, and consequently have been talk- ing of the need to organise this substratum so that it, too, shall command a living wage in its own industry, he has been engaged in the real task of organising to render that danger as impotent as organisation will alone render it. The work Nicholas did 111 West Wales was verv materially defensive work OIl behalf of the Aberdare miners and railwaymen. This side of the Rev. Nicholas' clerical life, is one that needs to be fully realised and appreciated, for a man who for no other purpose than the better- ment. of his fellow-man, and particularly of "the bottom dog." will work as he is revealed as having worked is no man to be lightly oast aside. And that is»J>ut oiw of the many facets that his character exhibits to those who know him through association in Democratic move- ments—association that ever places him in the position of leader, and that always gives birth to a warmth of friendship that is one of the best gifts of God to man. As speaker, pleader of unpopular causes; propagandist in industrial development, we have learned to know his.worth —a worth that would enrich Parliament, nay, that will enrich the House of the Common- people's representatives—as it is to become in truth—after December 14th has passed.

Liberalism as We Know It. I BY A SILVER-BADGE MAN." TO THE SDITOR. Dear Worker.— We hear a lot about the great Liberal Party, but what is its counpositlon., If tlw electors will only investigate a little and do a bit of thinking off their own bat, they will find that the Liberal Party is composed of Coal- owners, merchants, imposters, lawyers, large landowners, and capitalists, whose sole end and aim is to get all they can out of the fellow who is not of them. They are exploiters pure and simple, and always have been since the Capital- ist System called them into being. Their poli- tical religion is: Keep the poor poorer, and so make the rich richer. They are opposed to every- thing which the term Liberal implies. Well do I remember the time when so-called Liberalism reigned supreme. The working man was lucky to get a wage of 25/- a week, and the working girl was indeed fortunate to get 6/- per week for working twelve hours a day. This is not many years ago, but unions and arbitration courts have altered all that. And it is due en- tirely to the Labour Party and the great Labour Movement that the lot of the working man and working woman is 100 per cent. better to-day than it was twenty years ago. Our Liberal is really similar to the Tory, and both represent anti-democratic political systems. Both are where their own class interests are concerned. The Liberal Party whilst denouncing Socialism has been trimming its sails towards that creed for years. Liberalism as we know it is nothing but a delusion and a snare. The working man and working women all over the country are kicking against it because they are quite tired of being made pawns in the game of politics. I ask any sensible elector: Is it in these circum- stances worth while supporting Liberalism any longer? If so-called Liberalism should come out victor in this fight, a very remote possibility, the position of the working man and working woman will be as bad or worse than it was twenty years ago. We can only judge the future by the past, and when all is said and done, the issue before the people is Capital versus Labour. The Capitalist naturally is striving his hardest to burst up the unions and get cheap labour. The worker is striving in the opposite direction. And so it will be till the end of the Capitalist System. I ask the workers to think along and hard before casting their vote on polling day.— Yours, etc I SILVER-BADGE MAN. A bercanaid, November 30th, 1918.

UNDERPAID TINPLATERS' ADVANCE. It has now been definitely arranged that the advance from 62t per cent to 80 per cent. to those engaged in the tinplate industry whose earnings are under j61 a week shall be paid &a from November 4th.