Hunger has the whip hand all the time

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane, March 23, 1895.

Bystanders' Notebook.

THE NEWCASTLE MINERS.

If the capitalist be not profited the world may starve, is the lesson daily ground into the receptivities of the workers by the hard pestle of experience. Hunger is a champion whip, and the dividend swallower never fails to secure him when he wants to round up the refractory labourers into the stockyard of reduced wages. In all the conflicts which are now so frequently waged in the industrial arena the man who can play a waiting game wins in the end; and who can so well afford to wait so the man who has been absorbing the immense profits accruing to successful business enterprises to-day? And who as ill-equipped as the poor devil who has to sell his only commodity at cost price, viz., for just enough to enable him to subsist and thereby renew his strength, and who, having never had anything to put by, has nothing to fall back upon in times of struggle, and is as clay in the hands of the mammonitish potter.

Banded together by a bond of common suffering and despair the men are certainly stronger but even then the union funds, enfeebled by continued drains made on them by the vast numbers of starving members (instance the stonemason's union in N.S.W., 500 of whose members are permanently unemployed) collapse under the strain, and after suffering all the agonies of semi-starvation the men are forced to give way and return to their work worse off than before. Hunger has the whip hand all the time. A prominent case in point is the Newcastle coal strike, numberless other disputes there are but this will serve our purpose as well as any. At the Burwood, Lambton, Waratah, Greta, and other mines in the district the men have received notice that unless the reductions are accepted within fourteen days the mines will close down, which is turning on the hunger stop with a vengeance. The men so far are holding out firmly on the principle, I suppose, that after having their miserable pittance further reduced it is just as preferable to play and starve as work and ditto. Frantic efforts are also being made by some of the men to reorganise the miner's union which has become much disorganised of late owing to strikes, disaffection on the part of men, who after all were only human, and could not bear to see wife and children starve outright, and internal dissensions.

Altogether the state of things in Newcastle is appalling. Black misery and destitution reigns supreme. There in that one little fruitful spot on the devil's earth is displayed in miniature all the despotism, all the mammonism, all the misery and starvation that is spread – a hideous plaster – over the civilised world. And what is to be done? Nothing! Nothing can be done while bodies of men waste what little energy they have in feebly fighting individual capitalists without realising that the system is the whole cause. Until this is firmly and fully perceived by the mass of workers the efforts of reformers, their struggles for the betterment of human affairs, will be but as the “crackling of thorns under at pot” while the fire devours and the winds scatter the remains. The whole of the evils of our civilisation are caused by planlessness in production and the private ownership of the means of production; substitute for this an orderly system of production under State control and with State ownership of the means of production, and material benefits are assured to the vast mass of the people together with the foundations for intellectual and spiritual advancement. But this cannot be obtained until the people see the evil clearly, and as clearly see the remedy. They are incapable of seeing it to-day for though the effects are around them, and they having the cause explained daily, they having eyes are blind and though possessed of ears hear nothing. Yet it is as clear as noonday to the initiated that Socialism is gradually being evolved, and that theirs is the cost who in their blindness refuse to hasten its advent. MAY DAY.

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THE fastest man in Australia over 130yds. and 220yds. is J. Mc.Garrigal; 440yds., J. Atkinson, Sydney; 880yds. and 1760yds., D. Junner, Footscray.

A RETURN match has been arranged, to take place in Melbourne on March 21^st. 22^nd. and 25^th, between Victorian cricketers and Stoddart's English team.