Pioneer

The Scottish Trade Union Congress on I Conscientious Objectors. A resolution has just been passed by the Par- liamentary Committee of the Scottish Trade Union Congress "urging His Majesty's Government to at once make an enquiry into the treatment of Conscientious Objectors under mil- itary control."

HAVE YOU PAIN? J. Swift, Attercliffe, Sheffield, says':—"The first dose" gave me great relief. I can confidently say that one box of these pills has done me more good than all the medicine I have taken." Mrs. A. Wilkinson, of Nelson, states: My sister, who suffered from weak kidneys, took one box, and it has done her more good than pounds spent on medical men." HOLDROYD'S GRAVEL PILLS, a positive ?re for Gravel, Pains in the Back, Dropsy, Bright's Disease of the Kidneys, Gout, Sciatica; is. 3d., al! chemists; post free 14 stamps.- HOLDROYD'S MEDTCAL HALL, Cleckheaton.

Opponent Still Drifting. By JOHN HAWKINS. ft appears that our friend, the Treasurer, will not argue on the merits, or demerits, of the in- jured workmen's case. I am exceedingly sorry that this is the case, for I was eagerly wanting someone to cross swords, and hoping that a little good may result therefrom. Now this is im- possible. owing to the fact that the person who has come into the field will not argue. Deviating from the point may be desirable for my friend, but it is not argument. Deviation means that the ground has become untenable, and to save his face he desires to drift. So I hope that if I follow him a little, to show the fallacy of his reasoning, I ""hall be excused. A little while ago a personal friend of mine was engaged in a con- troversy in the columns of a well-known daily on "Socialism versus Liberalism," and he said to me one day, I have an apology for an op- ponent." If my friend had written the case for the light employment men. I am sure that he would not hesitate to again make use of the same remark. When dealing with a question like this, reason is necessary in order to be able to analyse/but brevity" and other work" is put up as an excuse for the purpose of cov- ering inability. The Treasurer has stated: When you refer to the attitude of the Com- mittee towards your being exempt, you must not forget that it has got to be made up to the district out of the contributions of other mem- bers of the lodge, so I don't see how you can accuse me of trying to squeeze you when I, with others, help to pay your quota to the district." That proves that what I said in my last reply, that a person could not be a non-Unionist when the lodge pays its dues towards the upkeep of the district, wastriie. It also proves that the light employment men have worked on consti- tutional lines, and the members of the lodge came to the conclusion to help those who arc weak It further proves that when Walters stated "that we had not worked constitution- ally." he made a statement that lie knew to be untrue. Allow a, person sufficient rope, and he will do the needful without the assistance of another individual. As before stated. I have never known Walters being agreeable to work on right lines for the benefit of the light employment men. But don't forget the poiiit--that-we should not pay, nor be paid for, owing to the fact of us not receiving full benefits. I am told that my criticism of the Nottingham resolution is very erroneous "and not workable." Regarding it bet- ing erroneous, what a fine opportunity was gi- ven for my friend to prove it wrong But he did not prove it wrong; he did not even at- tempt 10—because he could not. Not making an effort to show the supposed fallacy of what I wrote, as far as the Treasurer is concerned, simply points out that the statements I made were right. Now. what cannot be conceived or appreciated by another, is not workable" to him; but to the' man who can see and ap- preciate it, is "workable." So the point^.centres on our understanding as to the kind of condi- tions we care to exist under. If yon have pre- historic ideas, you will not get beyond the past, if most people are like you. If you possessed advance thought and noble ideals, then you would work in the direction of putting the dis- abled on an easy, comfortable and sound foot- ing. My aim is in the realisation of the lat- ter. Those who disagree with me cling to the former. In my last reply I made it clear that" the person who was against the men as a whole deciding any monetary matter was ag- ainst progress, and therefore reactionary. When the person who says he differs from me wrote And let me inform you, John, that it is a foregone conclusion that if a ballot is taken on the 1/- or 2/ that the 1/- would certainly carry. he proves the correctness of the above statement. Now. I maintain that the individual who believes in forcing the men to pay without the whole having a voice in the matter, is an opponent of Democracy. Being an enemy of Democracy, he believes in power being possessed by the few that can be used against the interests of the many. Power being in the hands of a few. and used against the whole, can only be advocated by a reactionist. A reactionist is a hindrance and a drawback, because he desires to get. into a, position now filled by another, for the purpose of self-aggrandisement. Because it is assumed that the men would vote for the lesser sum, youths come along and deny them the right to vote. Not only is this an admission that the light employment men a,r8 against paying the 2/ but also that the able-bodied men are not agreeable. I thank my friend, the enemy, for making this argument so easy for me. His judgment of the men is that they would stick to money before principle. Principle, in his opinion, does not exist among them: all they are concerned about is paying the lesser sum. It takes boys with a few months' experience to teach them where their interests lie. The peculiar part of the whole thing is that persons of this stamp try to point out a way in which thev can shuffle themselves into positions. No individual is any use to the men, who is against them having the right to say what amount they should pay in- to the funds of any organisation. The Treasurer says: "It is" against all ethics to expect any other, meaning, I suppose, that Lhe most of the men would hold on to money until the last. Now, that is the worst mis-statement that I ever read in my life. Moral principles, also right or wrong conduct, is not gauged by money by the large percentage. Money does not enter the minds of the great mass; it is only thought of by the low and degraded, which number, I am glad to say, is not large. They do a thing because, according to their light, they believe it to be right. They oppose a thing because they believe it to be wrong. Stat- ing that it is against all ethics to expect any other," but that the men would vote 1/ -before 2i- without weighing principles, is an insult to the workers. Although one could drive a car- riage and pair through the two contributions sent in by Walters, it is not necessary to pro- long the agony. I will bear with him a little, hoping that time will bring about an improve- ment. Coming back to the case about which I want to argue, I may 'be permitted to put a few questions to the Gilfach boy: (1) Is it1- just to expect a man to pay full contributions when he don't receive full bene- fits? If you answer in the aCrmative, do not ramble, but prove it. > (2) As you have admitted the light employ- ment men got a case, is it not folly to spend money in law courts, when there is another way ? (3) What is the use of laws, if you don't get them administered? (4) If they are not administered, is it be- cause of the fact that the benches are filled with members of another class ? T (5) Would there be any need of going to a county court, if every man, whether injured or not, apt the average standard rate. plus prevailing percentages, for the work being done by the able-bodied, and the former grade of work done by the injured? The last question should be embodied in a coal wage agreement. Regarding the open let- ter to a certain person, I must say that if most men were like the lad from below, failing to grasp what is best for their improvement, and noL making any attempt to remove that which is wrong, and iniquitous, then I would be om- nipotent.

Peace, Peace, When There is No Peace ? I By A. E. COOK. I On all sides tortured voices are crying out in agony of soul, the wail of the orphan, the bereaved, the fatherless, and the husbandless are heard throughout the great continent of Europe. The cry goes up from war-weary hearts of How long, how long, 0 Lord?" But the roar of guns and the crack of shells drown the wail- ing voices. Listen to the fragmentary murm- urmgs from every land that break through, despite the noise of guns, despite the gov- ernmental barriers raised between man and man. From. FRENCH SWITZERLAND comes a stinging rebuke to the "business as usual" par- riots, who mouth blood-thiijsty phrases whilst remaining sheltered behind the human wall of soldiers. From the June issue of "Les Docu- ments du Proges" comes the following: These past weeks of bloodshed have brought about the re-appearance of someone who was forgotten—the soldier. It is true that juir brave poilus form a heroic image in our minds— a moving thoughtalmost, a, happy one How splendid they are. How worthy of en- vy is their fate I At the end of their articles the military critics evoke before our eyes the picture of the great human wall standing bettween us and danger. It might seem as if inr our pious sympathy we suffered with the sol- diers Illusion Error Our words deceive us If only we knew how to suffer with the soldiers. If the people at home could only see this/ wrote a boy of the 1915 class, at the time of our last offensive, the war would not last two days.' The people at home do not see it. They close their eyes, for thev are afraid of a revulsion of feeling. They let this little one be killed, and now he lies buried beneath the earth of Champagne. Still they allow their children, their husbands, brothers friends to be killed in tens of thousands day by day, heedless of the pleading cry for life. 'If the people at home could see it.' Can the soldier hope any- thing from us? We have grown so used to sheltering ourselves behind the famous "human wall," and.to trembling before any action as before sacrilege that this question shocks our feelings. The soldiers crouch in their trenches, they advance towards death. The civilians continue with even step their way through life. They go to business, and as good patriots read the dailn, communique and rail against the Ger- mans.. That is all they want. They forget to take the part that should be theirs in the war. They betray the soldier's faith bq refusing to fulfil their task. They are the spec- tators of felie fight, the umpires, the judges. They are the witnesses outside the action, free from the call to murder for duty's sake or for self-defence. They are freed from the yoke at discipline. To them falls the peaceful conduct of the war. This part is all the more essential as war is supposed to be, not the animal on- slaught of two enemy nations, but each nation says that they have resigned themselves to it as the most cruel sacrifice, that in the spirit of reason and justice they are waging the war from hatred of Wialr. Eiaeh.n-e of us is responsible for the blood that is mingled with the swollen waters of the Mouse.. When shall we raise our voices to ask reckoning of the war to ask whether there is any need for the soldiers still to perish before the inevitable .ag- reement of nations is reached?" From GERMANY comes the same cry. A soldier, in a letter to his wife, written after the battle on the Bessarabian Frontier on the night of 18th January (quoted in the "New Re- public," New York) says: -"The earth was like a volcano. The shrapnel bursting in mid-air, the grenades, the exploding gas bombs; add to this the whistling of the rifles. the .rattle of the machine guns, the unceasing explosions of the hand grenades and mines; and most terrible of al!I. the moaning of the wounded, and the heaped-up corpses. This was a picture that would have sufficed to cause instant end to be put to this terrible world drama had one of those who hold the reins of power amongst our enemies, been condemned to go through it-if only for a, quarter of an hour." iin, in tne "Der Evangelische Arbeiter- bote the letter of a gunner at the front to his 13-vear-old sister is quoted. The girl had said 'Be quick and make cold clay of those old Rus- sians we want a victory to cheer us up again here.' The brother answers thus Your let- ter shows that you have no sense of what this terrible war really means. You were not thin- king at all i when you spoke like that. But that's just it. You ought to think. Make cold elay of those old Russians'! You did not see them lying there as I did: those poor dead, with strange solemn faces, in the stormed tren- ches. You saw nothing of the horrible fight which proceeded, nor received by many a one of Illr comrades while they made cold clay, as vo- call it. You forget, that those also have parents, sisters and brothers who loved them. You did not see the gruesome destruction of villages and towns, nor the poor hunted people in their terror, all that they called own burnt down. You would shudder, had you to walk in broad daylight through the villages here; and you do not know how happy you all are that you have not got,the war at home. And neither do we fight in order to cheer you up. It is many months now that we have been day and night in the open, and we bear privations and wounds not that you may get a. scnom holiday, or feel in better humour when you sff, at a beer table, but to save you from the terri- ble misery of war, and that Germany may nou- rish, and become strong in the future. A heavily-censored article in the Nepszava" (H unearian Socialist) on the" Road to Peace says: Our hearts bleed, when we think of the ornense values which disappeared under the waves of the Skagerak on May 31. Our souls cry out when remembering those seven thousand men—of our German and English fellow creatures- who have been droAvned in the salt seas as if they were so man,, noxious rats. And we are to rejoice because this is the road to Peace! Yes, through a sea of blood and fire; through a hurricane of deatlicrles through miseries and tears of widows and orphans lies to- day, the road to Peace. Quickly, quickly,- let horrors come upon us and heap up hundreds of thousands of corpses; destroy in hours and minutes milliards of human lives. This is the road to Peace: this road we must follow —and it seems that we are near its end. Woe to us that it should be thus! Woe to us that this is the road to Peace! It is to the burning shame, to the eternal disgrace of humanity that it should be so. How many millions of human beings have lost their lives? How many flourish- ing towns burnt to ruins? Into what omtly mourning has the world been thrown! How the costly ships and guns with cheap human lives (and how cheap men have become) have been sent to the bottom of the seas.. (Here fol- lows a big blank space, the censor's work.) 4 Swiss writer in the "Berner Tagwacht" re- ports a conversation between himself and a German soldier, which took place at an inn in Southern Germany. The German soldier says "My wife is Swiss, but I have to fight for my nominal Fatherland. I know no enemy. for the man opposite to me is unknown to me, and I am unknown to him, so why should I kill him ? As soon as I have leave, good-bye, old -Fatherland! And so on. On every hand protests are be- ing uttered; soldiers, civilians, all except the perfervid blind, and the greedy interested are shedding the scales that had previously blihded them to the horrors of war. A growing minority of the French Socialists are regaining once more a conception of the real meaning of our International ideal. In the French Chamber, M. Brizon uttered a, remark- able protest in the name of this minority, and he and his colleagues then voted against the war credits. Thic action, though received al- most unanimously by the Chauvinist press with violent abuse and angry outbursts, is significant of hope to the Avar-Aveary peoples of Europe. In the Le Populaire du Centre (Limoges), a much-mutilated article protests against the governmental lie that this war is to end milit- arism. and it points out that already arsenals and dockyards have contracts for the supply of munitions of war for years to come, and that by all the appearances militarism will still flourish after the Allies' victory. The writer's conclusions are suppressed by the Censor, but without a. doubt it is straw showing a new current in French thought. Let us. too, then renew our courage, and despite persecution persist in our fight for the realisation of the brotherhood of man. Are we slaves of our speech that we should be afraid of words, and, like little children, be scared at the mere men- tion of bogies'? Can we not break the ropes of words that bind us to the chariot of Moloch? Prussian Militarism" in Britain; the hated Boche in France; the "Cossack ogre" in Germany; interchangeable epithets, and the same abusive arguments used in but different languages the peoples of Europe bound fast in the toils of wordy hatred, more prone to find enemies than friends. And behind the journ- alistic venom. behind the thunder of the battle, behind the blood and agony, the soulless ma- chine of capitalism grinds its merciless round. Whilst brave men are dying for an ideal of a better Europe, the profiteers tot up their totals of war profits, and plan new schemes of exploitation. Glibly the capitalists at home talk about the coming economic war with Germany, they talk about protection/' ttbout" price- cutting," about the triumph of British capital if only the British workman will disliawd his un- patriotic Trade Unions, etc. When will ye, 0 Workers of Britain, Workers of the World, see behind the mask, and perceive the damnable horror of it all? Enemies! forsooth! The enem- ies of Europe are slavery, exploitation and ig- noimi.ee and arraigned againgst these enemies are the Socialists of Europe. We are Pacifists because we realise the true inwardness of the struggle that is going on to-day. We realise that the conflicting, selfish interests of different na- tional groups of financiers and capitalists leads inevitably to open war between those groups; with the consequent embroiling ef the peoples of the respective countries by a shameful abuse and distortion of the patriotism of the people, engineered generally through the medium of a corrupt press and pulpit. We Socialists realise that there can never be permanent Peace until the cause of modern warfare is destroyed, afrid that cause has its roots in the system of private ownership in the wealth of the world. Competition after profits is a fruitful cause of antagonisms and fights; if we aro-foolish enough to allow to men the possibility of making huge fortunes out of war- fare, we cannot but expect these gains to blind men to the dictates of sympathy and human- ity. History teaches us the lesson, that in every epoch of time, material interests and conditions have been the chief dominating fac- tors in actions of the ruling classes so conning that lesson we must realise that we must lav the axe to the root of the tree if we would fell it. The hope of the world is not an effete aristoc- racy, nor a bloated plutocracy, but in an intel- ligent and educated Democracy; the working peoples of the world have never yet taken a hand in the ruling of the world; Democracy cannot be called a failure because it has never been tried; and, unlike our aristocratic and plu- tocratic predecessoue, we have not a private axe to trrind in the governing of the commonwealth. W„ aim at a world free from classes, and free from the bitterness and hatred that springs from an unfair system of society. Call us dreamers. Utopian, if you like; yet we stand on firmer ground than all your con- servative prejudices of degradation convinced of the inate nobleness and potentiality for good in man, we are content to work and sacrifice for the realisation of a Avar-free world-wide Brotherhood of all the Nations of the Earth. Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furl'd In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world. There the kindly sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

The Editor's Appeal. Week Ending July 15, 1916. Share Capital. I, s. d. Bargoed Pioneer Committee 5 0 J. Williams, Dowlais 2 6 7 6 Shilling Fund. Brynmawr and Nantycrlo N.C.F 5 0 Abercwmboi Pioneer Committee 5 0 Glais I.L.P. Committee 5 0 Bargoed Pioneer Committee 4 6 E. Hugheo, Pbntypridd 3 6 E. J. Williams. Penydarren 2 6 D. Jenkins, Merthyr 2 6 J. Lewis, Cbfn 2 6 Comrade J. Lewis, Mountain Ash 1 6 Ned Preston, Argoed 1 0 A R ea der 1 0 W. H. Hawkin 1 0 Man on the Cross" 1 0 T. J. Williams 1 0 370

11 PROPAGANDA, NOT PROFIT," is the motto of the Pioneer Press." If you are alive to the tremendous social improve- ments that the Party the Pioneer" represents stands for. then it is your duty to all that I all your Trades Union, Co-operative, and General Printing comes to Wifliams' Square, Merthyr the Home of the Pioneer."