Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/34

32 For some years almost every important issue has been decided by the arbitration court against the toiler; and the working class endures that.

The government is plainly in alliance with the exploiting corporations, upholds the steamship trust, the coal trust, the bank trust, the fish trust, the oil trust, and many other trusts, and although this is perfectly apparent to any observer, the working class submits to it.

To make any protest and to urge the pure proletarian movement would not be to the advantage of our party or our candidate. People are not ready for such things yet. If we take an advanced position we shall not be able to carry the election.

In New Zealand, as in Australia, all workingmen continue to create wealth but do not possess the wealth that they create. They continue to toil for the pleasure and aggrandizement of the masters. They continue to live under a system that enables idlers, parasites and cogging knaves to ride pleasantly upon the toilers' backs; a system that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer; that places a premium on dishonesty and penalizes virtue; a system so ingeniously contrived in deviltry that the greater the efficiency of the worker the greater the amount of which he is robbed. They continue to live under this system and to have no means of protest against and no present hope of relief from it, although they know that it condemns four men in every five to existence below a rational standard of food, shelter, comfort, leisure and opportunity. They see, or can see if they but look around them, that every year the forces that establish and maintain these evils become more powerful in their country and that the difficulty of ever dislodging them becomes greater, and against all this they have no means of revolt and no impetus thereto, because they have been bedeviled by the game of politics. They want to elect this man or defeat that, and they entirely lose sight of the only thing in the world that is of real importance to them or to any of us, and that is the