Saturday 15 April 2017

Bystanders' Notebook August 10, 1895

*THE WORKER*
BRISBANE, AUGUST 10, 1895.


Bystanders' Notebook.

ARE WE READY?

Soon the general election will be upon us fellow workers. Are we ready to vote for freedom or shall we, who have nothing to lose but our chains, vote once more for wages slavery? We who have a vote have a double duty forced upon us – that is to vote for the emancipation of those whom necessity and unjust laws disallow the vote. You have been told often by your oppressors that the power lies in your own hands to effect whatever change you desire. If this is correct, and I for one believe it is, how is it we do not make more progress towards that freedom that everyone who values the future desires? Let us explain it. You see Jack Jones and Bill Smith riding about in their carriages, and of course they tell you that you have the same opportunity as they have of becoming rich, and you believe it. Yes, and more than that, you send them into the Assembly to make laws for you. In most cases such laws crush you down and down. Do you not know that to keep one drone in idleness and luxury there must be many without even the necessaries of life. And you, O' wage slave! it is you who are helping to crush yourself, and by voting wrong you drag that large body of disenfranchised ones down with you. If a man wishes to climb a hill it is of no use sitting down and looking at it. He must get up and walk. So it is with the workers if they want reform; they must learn to work, and not only work but learn to fight as well – ever on the aggressive, ever marching on, ever fighting against wrong; and then, comrades, freedom will come. And to-day we have the opportunity which poets and philosophers have longed to see. We are living in the golden age if we only avail ourselves of its many opportunities, for under proper representative Government whatever the people desire shall be theirs. Let not history have to place on record that the people of Queensland were offered their freedom and refused it. Perhaps, fellow workers, you will refuse it. You have often done so in the past, led away by thou who profess to be your friends. Watch closely lest they do so again by bringing forward some mongrel policy, or even by taking some of your present labour platform.                                                                                                                                                  FERDINAND                            

* * *

GAOL DISCIPLINE.

Reader, did it ever dawn on your mind that the proper man to make rules and regulations for a gaol is not the manikin who has never “done his bit of time,” but the man who has been there innocently for a few years. The man who has been in gaol has an idea as to how the different regulations act, and how the punishments affect a man, and consequently he would be more fitted for the job. But he who has never been there except in an official capacity is too apt to forget that the men there have just the same feelings as he has, and is too prone to look on them as brutes, “Dammed animals," haw, haw!                                                                                                        TRUTHFUL DICK

* * *

UNINFORMED ALDERMAN.

Alderman Thurlow certainly does not know much about conducting municipal affairs on Democratic principles. He is indignant at the idea of the Workers' Union offering suggestions to the council on the question of contracting and workmen's wages. The law may provide for calling tenders, but it does not follow that tenders must be called for for all work done, and as some of the work of the council is being done by day labour, there can be no logical objection to extending the principle. It has been proved that much of the work now let to contractors, could be as well and as cheaply done by day labour and with far more satisfaction to the workmen. The poor ferries are again trotted out by this intelligent individual, who proposes not only to lease the ferries but also sell the whole plant. It's time aldermen of the Thurlow type were given to understand that the people most interested in efficient ferries were tired of their nonsense. Instead of leasing the ferries, the movement should be towards making them as free as the rest of the highways, for they are only part of the common thoroughfares, made and maintained by public money for the benefit of the public. All the talk about employing ratepayers is so much cant. Are not all workmen ratepayers, directly or through the landlord as tenants, or through the householder as a lodger, but then the two last named very often have no vote, and that accounts for the fatherly consideration these gentlemen profess for the ratepayers.                                                                    C.W. MARTIN

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