Pioneer

Newport Notes. I Newbold at the I.L.P. Mr. Walton Newbold delivetred his concluding lecture at the I.L.P. on Saturday. A multitude of facts illustrated the statement that the various coal, iron and distributive companies were linked up in a gigantic combination. Guest, Keen and Nettlefold, Baldwins, The Mannes- mann Tube Works, Lord Rhondda's ooal inter- ests and the Ebbw Vale Co., among others, came in for treatment, showing their community of Interest, and their connection with similar and diverse undertakings scattered over the oouarbry. The lecturer showed how these business, interests were not only national but International in their jamifioatdone. This combination of employers, and of the skilled worker by machines, the unified control and system of manufacture, the standardisation of all possible products and the introduction of women workers Drought about by the contingencies of the war, were creating the conditions necessary for the solidarity of the workers, regardless of sex, na- tionality or colour. The sweeping away of craft and trade unions would necessarily follow these ounditime, and we must hasten the coming of international industry organisation by education. We must study economics, history, and the irvolution of social life, and be animated by the gpiril of the founders of the I.L.P. in an un- compromising war on Capitalism, aiming at In- 8and Political power in the interest of Oe werken wwW

An Aberdarian's Book. IE "]Mower of tke Dark," Joseph Keating. Cae- sell and Co., 6/- net.] r It is only fitting that as Merthyr has produced one of the finest illustrators of the present de- cade of artists in the person of Mr. Michael, so I the Aberdare Valley should have given us a novelist who looks like inheriting the literary legacy of our Hall Came, or Charles Garvice, or Silas Hocking-in the person of Mr. Joseph Keating. Joseph Keating first saw the light somewhere in our sister valley, about Mountain Ash, I believe, and served his apprenticeship to letters in journalism, being connected with the Western Mail." Very sensibly Mr. Keating as a novelist writes about the land he knows so well, and in his latest book Flower of the Dark," h-è has woven a romantic story of life and war, and coal-king rivalry against a back- ground that is splendidly typical of our own neighbourhood. His folknames must be a trifle difficult to English readers whose children are not usually christened as are his heroes and heroines in Welsh words such as Aeronwy, Gwer- fil, Tomos, Idwal, Beti and so on, but in all probability they will suffer the inconvenience with a grateful feeling that they are getting the real thing—as they undoubtedly are. I am not imputing that the reader of Flower of the Dark will be enabled at its conclusion to talk of the psychology of South Wales, though even that would be better than a lot of the stuff that is being talked about our speck of the earth. For one thing, I always regard the person who takes his view of a people from a love story that has been written to while away an idle hour, as a hypocritical person who is seeking to excuse a perfect legitimate liking for this class of litera- ture under an intellectual pretence. I myself am not over struck on love stories-I would as soon think of doing penance by reading the Tal- mud as buying a copy of Garvioe or Caine-but I have found an interest in Keating; though he belongs much more nearly to their school than to the swashbucklers of Stevenson, or the hard- drinking adventures of Jack London that I per- sonallyaffect in my spare moments. For the lover of this kind of book—and they are by far the most numerous of all patrons of literature- the publication of Flower of the Dark should be interesting. It is well written; its plot and treatment is idealistic and melo-dramatic. One oan therefore get lost in the super-world of its heroes and heroines, and one does not ask more from books of this class. One noticeable and welcome feature of Mr. Keating's villain is that he is forced into villainy by the economic pres- sure of a powerful and unscrupulous rivalry. Keating's picture of the sordid meanness of the coal-lords in their mutual antagonisms, whilst being but fiction, has the saving grace- of not making all people with a banking account appear in his pages as angels and philanthropists. That he probably owes to his South Walian schooling, and his contact with the miners, who suffer from few of those pleasant illusions of the aver- age fictionist.

I Llanelly Notes. I.L.P. Sunday Lectures. The Llanelly I.L.P. has arranged a capital series of winter propaganda and educational lec- tures, opening with Guardian Davies' interest- ingly instructive address of Sunday last on "The Poor Law." It is hoped that all I.L.P.ers and readers of the Pioneer so far unattached to the Party will not only make an effort to turn up at the Dockers' Hall on Sunday evenings, but will also make a point of taking along a friend. Next Sunday Comrade B. Griffith will take the platform at 7 p.m.

I PLEASE MENTION THE PIONEER WHEN ANSWERING ADVERTS.

The Enemies of the People I hw weeks have been so exciting politically as this through which we are passing, which, at the time of writing, contains far more elements making for an early General Election than any that has preceded it. The three speeches de- livered by responsible departmental heads, has shown a chaotic state of opinion amongst these; and a want of co-ordination on essentials that the careful expurgated utterances of the past have cloaked to the general public. Sir Arthur Yapp, in his capacity of Director of Food Econ- omy, spent a great deal of time in Manchester i in telling us how to tighten our belts during the coming months, but he did not say one word of the inter-allied food-pooling scheme which, ao- cording to M. Painlevé, speaking in the French Chambers, only two days later, is a reality to be put into operation at once. It is inconceiv- able that such a scheme can be effectively oper- ated without a compulsory scheme of rationing being initiated on both sides of the Channel, yet the very man responsible for the economising of the British supplies is so obviously unaware of the true facts of the situation that he has no word to say of the matter in a carefully thought out speech on this very subject; a speech that far from recognising the position as the French Premier's announcement reveals it, is confined to an appeal for a further chance for the volun- tary rationing schemes, for the British people. But a far greater lack of consonance is displayed in the optimistic utterance of Sir A. Geddes, the Minister of National Service, who states that we have "entered the straight," and must "pull ourselves together for the sprint to victory," and the pessimistic French speech of Mr. Lloyd George, who in a speech such as' has never be- fore befouled the annals of British statesman- ship, Ie-aves no doubt that far from having en- tered the straight, we have only wandered into a combination of maze and quagmire, from which we are to be led by the old device of a new council the cowardly political way of side- tracking Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson, that has been applied with such doubtful success throughout the long, awful night of the past three years. Mr. George, the unstable opportunist, and discontented egoist, who owes his position to the most shamelessly engineered subterfuge and misrepresentation in modern political history, is still discontented with everything and everybody but Mr. George himself. That he might appear the bigger and the brighter he has not hesitated to malign his nation, and to assume the role of dictator, which nothing but an absence of all sense of political morality, and a misplaced bumptious assumption of Napoleonic ability, the faintest signs of which he has yet to display, could have led him to as- sume. He who has jettisoned all his old beliefs and ideals, has now jettisoned his pride of na- tionality, and his dignity in the high honour that has been awarded to him by the Swash- bucklers of the Jingo press, and not by the franchise of a free nation. He lies Sold his doubtful friends of the War Cabinet, and ignored the fundamental rights of the British House of Commons, and has precipitated a General Elec- tion, that he might add to his protean parts, that of politician—strategist of war. The whole record is a miserable travesty of the efficiency that is the primary demand of the moment it constitutes a stinking mass of secret diplomacy, and Machiavellian intrigue in home and inter- national politics, that more than anything that has gone before should bring home forcibly to the public the essential need to control things themselves. Too long these vainglorious feather-' lings of politics have strutted their pigmy selves across the stage- of living events., cawing their raucous rhetoric when what was needed was the conviction of deeds. The farce- must stop. It is the peoples will that must henceforth prevail; a people's will clearly expressed in a, people's peace programme; a people's will so acutely alive to things as they are that it will refuse to be hypnotised by the bright tinsel of the ready- made opinions of rubbishy sentimentality and personal ambition that has disgraced the' imme- diate past, that still more disgraces the moment. It is too futile to ask of these men who talk whilst the world goes down in ruin and blood what we are fighting for; it is for us to say what we are fighting for, and to secure those aims and objects upon which we are agreed at the lowest cost that honour demands. They are our brothers who die whilst the political charlatans practice their verbal legerdemain, our liberties that go into the melting pot every time, our children who whimper in hunger; it is for us to declare what payment we shall exact for these things. Let us know the facts, and then we can say what we will have. It may be that we shall decide to do even more than these political tricksters would have us do; but we shall do it as men acting consciously, and not as insentient pawns on an artificial chequer board, moved as it suits the personal ambition of political huck- stererrs. The greatest task of Socialism to-day is to insist, as it has all along insisted, upon the communal responsibility in the settlement of our national destiny; upon the need for a peace that shall be an honourable people's peace. That is the task that unscrupulous politicians will not accomplish so well as the great sane mass of properly-informed public opinion.

The N. U .R. and the Trades Council. No ONB can more deeply regret the unfor- tunately hot-headed action of the Merthy Branch of the N. U R. in throwing over the con- stitutional machinery of Labour in the Borough and appealing to the Town Council for the co- option of their nominee in the place of the late Coruncillor John Williams, than do we. No one has a more lofty opinion of the mission of the N.U.R. than we, and it is perhaps because we feel for the honour and the future of the N.U.R. as a Labour organisation of tremendous potency, tha/t we find ourselves so often obliged to take it to task, as we had recently when J. H. Thomas made his foolishly provocative speech in South Wales, and as we have now, when an ordinarily sane branch like the Merthyr one, takes the bit in its teeth; flies for protection to the very class which its nominees have fought in the past, and which it itself condemns for not belonging to Labour in the present. The unfortunate part of the whole affair is that the N.U.R. spokesmen before the Corporation should have presented such a bungled account .f the method which had been adopted for the sttloctiom of tke nominee in this particular case. Listening to them one would have thought that the whole thing had been engineered at a hole- and-corner meeting of the local colliery lodges, aisd that following secret diplomacy, the gigantic weight of the block vote of the miners had been exercised to quash the tricked railwayman into subjection. Such a view is nonsensical. The selectioif was open, straightforward, above board, and thoroughly constitutional, and the railway- men present did not even object when their nominee having been over-voted on a show of hands vote by two to one, an unanimous vote was asked for for Mr. Perkins. Their silence then should have kept them silent afterwards; instead of leading them to copy the behaviour of a spoiled ohild denied a new toy. It may be that they do object to the present system of voting; but if that is so their remedy is to sub- mit a better scheme and table a notice to amend the rules, and not to adopt dastardly tactics that will only estrange them from the affiliated labour organisation of the Borough. As it is, the whole thing has been a futility, but it is one that will have to be paid for. Labour can- not afford to pass by such breaches of agreement and good faith without adopting disciplinary measures towards recalcitrant units. Personally, we desire no such steps to have to be taken, but that course can only bo avoided by the railway- men expressing their regret over what, after all, was a hot-headed, and foolish action. It would be better for the N. U .R. and for organised La- bour locally to settle the affair with as little friction as is possible. That will only be possible if the N.U.R. adopts a reasonable view of its responsibilities in the affair and approaches the Trades and Labour Council in a contrite spirit.

A Message From Emrys Hughes. THE SPIRIT OF HARDIE WILL YET I CONQUER. Nothing curbs the spirit of Emrys Hughes. From his prison cell at Carnarvon—w here he is maintaining his "absolutist" objection to mili- tarism, he sends us the cheery message sub- joined. It is a crime that men who, like Emrys, have right through stuck hard to their position, who have refused to be cohersed into yielding the slightest jot or tittle from the stand they have made, though the forces opposed to them have been the most power fid the State can wield should be punished for their truth to an ideal. It is time that these men were given the freedom to which they are entitled under the Military Service Act, for they have splendidly vindicated their conscientious objections. Emrys writes: "To the comrades who are working for peace, I send my greetings. Work on, darkness is almost over, the era of blood and iron is almost ended. It is three long years since hell was let loose in Europe, and the fight for liberty has been, difficult, perhaps the hardest that British Demo- cracy has had to face for some centuries. But the spirit of Keir Hardie will yet conquer. Just after the war started, after the Aber- dare meeting where he was howled down, we were talking about the future- of the war. I asked him if there would be revolutions at the end of it. He quoted Ruskin, I think, to the effect that a European holocaust might result in great and beneficial changes. I remarked that the Socialist movement would receive a great impetus as a result of the war. When the poison's worked out,' he said. That's what is happening, the poison is working itself out, and as sanity returns the task of the I.L.P. will be easier. It is a time of transition, and the future rests with us. The young people of the I.L.P. must work on patiently, bravely, hopefully. Others will sing the song, Others will right the wrong, Finish what I begin And what I fail in, win. H Hail to the coming singers, Hail to the brave light brin, Onward I reach and share All that they say and daN. What matter I or they, Iklinw or some other's day, But the right word be Raid,, And life the sweeter made! The movement enters upon a new phase, the Labour proas must be strengthened and or- ganised, our propaganda must be increased ten- fold, all our efforts must be mtensafied. Onward! Forward

Flat Rate for the Building Trade. UNANIMOUS DECISION OF VALLEY I .1 ORGANISATIONS. A very important special meeting of the South Wales and Monmouth Building Trades Federa- tion was held in Cardiff on October 27th, when further discussions took place in favour of a building trade flat-rate. Letters were read by the Secretary from all the affiliated districts, except one, strongly supporting the proposed flat rate of Is. 6d. per hour for tradesmen and Is. 3d. per hour for labourers. The delegates from Ll-anelly, Newport, Swansea, Aberdare, Pontypridd, Barry, Merthyr, etc., etc., sup- ported their- district's letters with enthusiasm and determination. It was pointed out that the building trades had been sleeping for years and had much to make up, and only recently it had dawned upon them that their demands in the past had always been too moderate and had never met the changes that took place in the in- dustry, also in social life. And now with these abnormal times upon us we were hit very hard, and the proposed flat-rate demand was con- sidered very modest in such times as these. It was also pointed out that in some districts build- r ing trade workers could not be found to do very important work, as they had left the industry through inability to live upon the present wages. Many of these men could be found labou-ring for wages much higher than building trade rates. The object ctf the South Wales and Monmouth- shire Federation is to raise the building trade workers to a level equal to their service to the State. Since the meeting the remaining dis- trict has decided to support the above demands, and an unanimous notice was tendered to the employers on October 30th last to come into force on May 1st, 1918. This building trades flat-rata demand has grown so much all over the country that there is to be a conference in Manchester early in December next to discusiii what action is to be taken in support of these demands.

I HELP THOSE WHO HELP OWN VOgR PAPERI ?, .?

I The Teachers' Revolt. I I RESIGNATIONS RECEIVED BY MERTHYR EDUCATION AUTHORITY. I "AN UNWARRANTABLE LIBERTY." The revolt of the Secondary School teaohers- thirty-one out of thirty-seven—was discussed by the Merthyr Education Authority on Wednes- day, Mx. E. Morrell presiding. Tendering notices to terminate their contracts in December —the end of the term—they, in an accompany- ing statement, gave their reasons for such dras- tic action as being: — (1) Because of the differentiation it estab- lishes between two non-graduate masters in the Cyfarthfa School and the other non-graduate masters in the secondary schools in the borough; (2), because of the Education Committee's failure to maintain a differentiation between graduates and non-graduates, and on this point we (the graduates) demand that the graduates' maximum shall be at least L40 above that of non-graduates; (3), because we are dissatisfied with the amount allocated to teachers' salaries from the additional Treasury grant for 1916-17." High-Handed But—— Alderman F. T. James (chairman of the Se- condary and Evening Schools Committee) men- tioned he had met the assistants informally and without prejudice and they intimated that the committee had only allocated L667 out of the grant of £2,097 for secondary school teachers. Mr. Rhys Elias (Director of Education), how- ever, had stated that 9720 had been put aside for the increased salaries out of £ 1,700. Which- ever figures were correct, he did not think the authority should have retained so large a sum. It would be a misfortune if all the staff went out. Apparently they were prepared to sink or swim together. Then, too, if the Board of Edu- cation found the whole of the assistant teachers at the secondary schools resigned en bloc they would want to know why, and the authority would have to admit they kept about LI,000 cif the grant. Accordingly it was in the interest of the Education Committee and the Schools that the matter should be referred for re-con- sideration notwithstanding the teachers'—:— Mr. D. W. Jones: High-handed. (Laughter.) Ald. James: Thank you, high-handed ac- tion in sending in their resignations. The ob- jects of the Government in allocating the grant is to raise more or less permanently the salaries of our staff and attract into the profession the best men and women. I move these resignations be referred to the Secondary Schools Committee. Mrs. M. A. Edmunds seconded. Mr. John Davies: I thought the sub-commit- tee had pooled the whole of the Fisher grants. Mr. E. Morrell: No. We could not do that. Air. Davies continued that his interpretation of the position was the higher the education the greater the selfishness. Here was interference 1 good as telling" the Authority that they could not treat tried non-graduates as the com- mittee wIshed-the graduates placing themselves as dictators. Education to-day was not for the erudition of man apparently but for creating a spirit of selfishness. He was surprised at some of the teachers concerned joining hands in this business." The Economic Cause. Mr. Wm. Jones suggested that the teachers should be approached to withdraw their notices. Ald. Wm. Lewis op-ined "a set" had been made against the authority in its administration. It was a most unwarrantable piece of liberty." It was most improper on the part of these people to demand the allocating to them of the £ 1,000 in hand (which might well be utilised to alle- viate the rates) when they were as well paid as similar employees of other towns. Ald. James interpolated that Cardiff had spent nine-tenths of the grant and Swansea and Llanelly the whole on secondary education. Mr. L. M. Francis: Is not pqitting the non- degree men on a par with degree men the stumbling-block ? Aid. James: I don't gather that. I think Mr. Elias will agree with me. Fthink it is more for retaining in hand such a large portion of the eecondary schools grant. Mr. A. Wilson Supported the, motion to rels- gate the question to the Secondary Schools Committee. Mr. Morrel said whatever would be done it would be a difficult matter to interfere with the recent scale, although he had no personal ob- jection to any reasonable adjustment. Spike the Guns." Mr. D. W. Jones was for requesting the with- drawal of the resignations before considering tie situation. If the authority was going to act under a threat it would certainly be placed in. a very awkward position. Mr. Wm. Jones agreed. My motto," he said, is spike the guns. (Laughter.) Let tie start at the proper place." Eventually the motion for the reference of the deadlock to the Secondary Schools Committee was defeated by an amendment of relegating it to the Sialaries Sub-Corn mi t-tee. A further mo- tion that the teachers should be requested to withdraw their resignations and appoint a de- putation to meet the sub-committee was also adopted.

I Maesteg Notes. Wallhead at Maesteg. Under the auspices of the local Co-operative Education Committee, Mr. R. C. Wallhead lec- tured at Maesteg on Co-operation and Demo- cracy and exposed our patriotic capitalists, laying their system bare in all its hideousness. As illustrations he showed how thousands of tons of potatoes were exported to Chicago when there was an acute shortage in this country, thus forcing up the home prices; and how tea was t similarly exported to Holland and Denmark.

I Briton Ferry Notes. I Chas. R. Buxton at Jerusalem. Still another public peace meeting was held at Jerusalem Baptist Chapel on Tuesday, Novem- ber, 6th, when the speaker was Mr. Chas. Roden Buxton, M.A. Evidently the "enemy" at Swansea had not shattered his nerves. There was a very fine audience, and he delivered a most statesmanlike address. Mr. George Jones pre- sided.

I Pontycymmer Notes. I Lecture. Mrs. Edna Penny, Sheffield, spoko at the Co- opera tiro Hall, Pontyoymmar, on Democracy on Trial. I. L.P Comrades WaHhead and Neighbour are ex- pentod soon to spook lo the Poctyaymmar I.L.P.