THE HONGKONG Telegraph, Tuesday, March 16, 1937.
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TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 1937.
LUNATICS AND LEPERS
One of the Colony's most urgent needs, which was fully realised by Sir William. Peel during his Governorship, and is also just as keenly recognised by Sir Andrew Caldecott, is the provision of a properly equipped and adequately staffed Mental Hospital. It is to be hoped that the
of impending change Governors, consequent on Sir Andrew's appointment to Ceylon, will not resultar this For netter-bo-pigeon-holed.
more years than we care to re- member has the subject ap-
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various reasons have intervened to cause delay-in-a-matter-which ought to have been taken in hand Latter- fully twenty years ago. ly, financial stringency has been the factor. More than one site
has been officially ear-marked
for the erection of the asylum;
been
OMFORTABLE America has frightened by the successful auto- strike. It has upset the big employers,
gunmen, by showing that the workera have a weapon against which neither aples nor tear gas-are-of much use.
The internal spy systems have so far pre- vented mass organisation in the mass-produc- tion industries.
But spies cannot stop a hundred thoroughly irritated men stopping the nerve centre of an intricate plant, and throwing the whole assembly line out of gear.
The thing happens before the stool-pigeon can run to tell the boss. Either the spy has to sit-down as well:,, or " isn't it just too bad what happens to him?"
Beveral trusted weapons proved useless in Michigan. The large. consignments of tear and emetic gases shown to the journalists as a warning are useless in the open air. The wind blows the stuff away,
What is its use in a sit down strike? It may smoke out the men, but a drift may make the sacred office department equally unsafe.
A nit down strike is the Nemesis of mass pro- duction. A few men cari stop the whole intricate organisation. so the union withdraws only the vitally necessary men. The surplus labour is left. in the employer's hands, not the unions.
The pet device of forcing workers to sign loyalty cards becomes futile. The union told the men to sign the loyalty carda.
Of course our men signed 'em. shouldn't they? We don't want all the union men fred. They know they can't go back to work while we are out, so what?" sald Bud, in charge of the "toughest babies" among the strike pickets.
Political managers are as worried as Big Business, because, for the Arst time in a large-scale dispute, the workers have felt the value of organised political power.
"We backed you, Roosevelt. You can't turn the guns éh us," said the Though the sheriff, union men.
in hysterics, had armed every thug brought in from Chicago and Detroit, only once did he dare break out.
It was the organised backing wave of labour, not a more of emotion, that secured that eleven-million majority for Mr. Roosevelt,
office his union In every portraits were displayed as though he had been a Labour candidate. The Democratte. Party is anxious to keep that vote for the unpre- dictable next time.
Lewis is being blamed for pre- cipitating a strike, which he didn't want, and which, but for such favourable factors, might have
-------To-day's Thought-
SOME people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly.
TELL
the last was the area originallyTHERE
-SWIFT.
Gee, why
MICHIGAN
"Sit-down strikes are the Nomosis of mass production,"
The
wrecked his careful plans. $500,000 fund raised last year for the organising of the steelworkers, largely by dollar a head levy on the miners, is nearly, spent.
In Detroit and Toledo and Flint, I talked with organisers who had been out on that dangerous job, They had been hounded by sherlits, run out of town by Vigilante thugs. but their work had succeeded beyond even their hopes.
Men like Joe Dietzel, smashed by · thugs in Saginaw, near Filnt, while actually under police protection. forgot bruises and broken bones when telling of their work in steel. We can even convince Lawis of how much barking there is for the strike this spring... even be- yond our signed-up cards," they said.
in
Wall Street's operators, this period of booming armaments, didn't want the show-down in atcel They know wages there are too bad, grievances too spectacular. Aulos are America's best paid in- dustry.
To fight the new organising drive where it had made least
•
headway meant calling off the ex- perienced organisers from the steel plants.
This is not to say that General Motora directors started the sit- down. But it did happen that from insignificant plants in Georgia and Kansas came the impetus that swept through the almost unor- ganised Michigan industry.
What is the miracle of Michigan? Why in Wall Street worried?
"Now for the fight in steel and coal everyone was saying as I lelt USA. If autos, with less than 20 per cent. organised when the strike started, can pull off the victory that they have done, what will happen in the well-organised mincs.
with Governor Earle in Charge of the armed forces of Pennsylvania, and his eye on the. democratic nomination next time? Or steel? Pittsburgh is, also in Pennsylvania.
The leadership and the organi- sation, improvised as it had to be. struck me as pretty good. Com- whole of the mander-in-chler Michigan Front was Adolph Ger- mer, trained and experienced in the biggest American Federation of Labour fights.
At Flint were young men like Robert Travis, Powers Hapgood, (well-known from Labour confer-
DEMOCRACY
TRUTH
some people in this country who believe, or think they
set aside for the Central British believe, there is urgent need at this
near
ing the utter inadequacy and unsuitability of the premises for the purposes which they are supposed to fulfil. The place can only be described as a pri- son-and a very out-of-date and objectionable prison at that. So far from contributing to the recovery of patients, we can imagine no place more likely to drive the inmates to insanity. Not only is the asylum quite unsuited for what may be termed ordinary cases of in sanity, but there are types which provide the authorities with
social problems.
By "AN OLD STAGER”
that we could very well "do," to use a vulgarism that is expressive and intellectual not American with an dictator.
THE
to go on clinging to a non-existent
rock of nges.
NON-INTERVENTION MYTH
My
at the
onces.
and
in England)
Bud Symons, straight from the bench, as fascinating an Irishman as over stugged a scab for the good of his soul.
There was no strike pay, of course. Dorothy Kraus, a young Labour journalist, who is one of the rising young women of America, organised the Women's Emergency
of Committee, consisting
the strikers' wives, for feeding the pickets. At odd moments she or- ganised and rehearsed the Living Nowspaper of the Strike.
This was a parody on the events of the strike and, acted by the strikers, was a wild suceesa,
The strikers' wives wore natu rally worried about the Vigilantes Fascist thugs armed by the Sheriff.
But they roared with joy at a satire on the focat Vigilante meet- ing" and then somehow they aren't afraid any more," said wise well- Maricaton Vorse, the known writer, who went down to. help,
*
At Detroit the Bakers' Union simply took over the feeding of the thousands of strikers and sont re- lays of union men. Two of tho chefs on duty when I went to ad- dress a meeting of the Chevrolet men were working in big hotels in the city, and came straight off -duty-to-give their services_to_the
strikers.
The ciciency of that kitchen- cafeteria made me wonder why аго con- 'slave-driving foremen 'sidered necessary.
Cleveland strikers had a speci- ally difficult racial problem, which has made organisation difficult. Groups of workers do not even understand each others" Innguage... But to cut through the barriers, each national group took it in turns to provide their national dishes for the day and the cooking was marvellous.
To
Suffering
from diminished prestige anyway -just -now, Wall Street is trying to stop the rot in its usually docile public opinion. counteract criticism, huge posters all over the States are ad- vertising "The American Way."
Tho Shorter Hours" poster, which shows the American worker picnicking in the sunshine with his family, causes more blasphemous remarks than the "High Standard of Living" poster, with its attrac- tive views of the radio and re- frigerator in a worker's home, and car in foreground.
The American worker admits his But the gadgets on Instalments. high speed of the assembly line and the automatic press does not 1save much onorgy for plenies when the eight-hour intensity is OVCE.
School,
the Kowloon time for
strong, silent, dictator,
Take the Spanish civil war, now Since then there some British Mussolini or Hitler who Hospital.
being most furlously and scientifical- will dragoon everybody to his will, have been various other tenta- and clean up in the twinkling of an
ly waged and equipped for Spaniards by cosmopolitan experts of all na- tive suggestions, among the eyeild all our political, economic, and
tions. None
cold-drawn, angle-ironed facts prevent many of latest being the idea of locating
Those who hold sincerely to this
us devoutly persisting with that the institution somewhere in the view are of two quite distinct cate-
pretty fiction, the Non-Intervention the vast majority, New Territories. No-one who gories. The
In short, what we need at this Committee. Sheer hallucination, but, would-be obedient and homnge-pay- has visited the present so-called ing disciples of this miracle-werker, epoch is another Dr. Samuel Johnson, oh, so comforting!
Just the same psychological kink Mental Hospital can have seen are simpletons of the same order who u sincerely learned and clear-sighted conditions there without realis-swallow every word of the most critic, gifted with an even uncouth is disclosed in other relations of
quacis egregious
advertisements, power of passionate assertion, who everyday lite. We used to be trou- They would be equally enthusiastle would tell us, if we may still pursue bled by the monstrous legions of our perpetual nightmare. But now we official and convinced followers of table the primrose path of pure vulgarlem, unemployed. They were a sort of rapping and clanking-ghost super- just where we get off the bus.
have made the interesting stitions.
DELUSIONS PREFERRED
discovery that it is better to quote the statistics of employment instead, The minority, small and extremely I am temperamentally and con- select, are persons who secretly but stitutionally averse from dictatorship That enables us to shake off the bad dream of unemployed workers. Any subterfuge to
to dodge the unpleasant Armly believe they could, with their of the governing and administrative dream hands in their own pockets, luy order. But believe a purely educa- facts of existence. those hands on the uppropriate can- tienal dictatorship, by the right man, any only amazement is that now, didate for Chlef or Assistant-Deputy if he could be found, might do us instead of quoting our mortality sta Dictator,
all the good imaginable..
...tistics at so many dead per hundred Yet even normal persons, quite Unfortunately for us we have just thousand of the population, we do
reverse the
and process, outside both those well-marked cate last even our great paradoxical not
feel that epigrammatist G.K.C. is no more enumerate the surviving proportion. Igories, must occasionally
there is an opening for some inspired amongst us. He fell short of the full It would look over so much nicer and and inspiring leadership in Great stature of Boswell's here, but his brighter. After all, our enterprising Britain. to-day. My own feeling is scathing comments did help to scarify seaside resorts have ect us a fine the mentally hysterical and Intel- example. They advertise their daily lectually
impulsive. Perhaps the portion of sunshine, not their ration finest thing G.K.C, ever said was of rain.
Another typical example of men. pressure being brought to bear his remark that Christianity has not. to remove a reproach from been teled and found wanting, but tal side-stepping is our traffle scandal. That caustic criticism cuts to the 150 deaths and four or five thousand very real problem. in that there which the Colony has too lone has been found difficult and not tried. We are incurring an average of about is no institution in the Colony suffered. It must be assumed roots of a good many modern cock- lesser casualties every week on our sure theories, Indeed, the cardinal high roads. In the last eleven years where proper treatment thereof
that our Unofficials have, at one crime of this age, certainly in this well over seventy thousand people can be provided. What is ob- time or another, as visiting country, is a refusal to face awkward have been done to death on the ronds viously needed is a modern Justices of the Peace, seen for facts, but to prefer conveniently easy and about a million and a half of or leps badly hurt. A asylum, in charge of an ex-themselves how far short of
Just take a casual glance around. locking proportion of these have perienced alienist. It need not what is needed, the existing At present our politics is mainly been young children, the citizens wi be a big, costly institution, and Mental Hospital falls.
concerned with foreign affairs. Our are being gloomily assured we shall They deadly obsession is another great war. badly need in the years of reduced think so, state outright that no the idea of locating it in the New should, therefore, be under no Our sheet anchor is the League of birthrate just ahead.
amount of human casualties can be permitted to hold up
the onward Territories, where the inmates delusions concerning the neees- public schoolboy knows, not to men Nations. Even the quite ordinary
march of mechanical evolution and. would be able to engage in sities. And at the same time, lan such a precocious little Intel- We are beginning to become quite rapid human progress? One could at healthful outdoor pursuits, has we urge that they should take lest at the League of Nations ns creasing holocaust. Every imaginable atitude. Peckaniajan pretence and perturbed by this steady and in- least respect the honesty of that much to commend it. The up the question of the provision it is now constlluted and functions is remedy is being suggested-except ometal humbug are marely disgusing, It is an old joke that nobody was mitter is one which we com- of a much-needed Leprosarium, about as useful as a sick headache, the obvious one of reducing speed.
But since, in this materialistic age, Only a few regrettable cranks or ever made unwell by the champagne mend to the attention of which might with advantage Geneva is our only refuge from the moral perverts venture to whisper or port wine. It is always
promptly salmon mayonnaise that lets us down: Unofficial members of the Legis- niso be established in the New elings and arrows of outrageous that one, and they are
militarism, most of us refuse to re-hush-hushed off the stage. Why not after the junkoting This very lative Council, with a view to Territories.
cognise that palpable fact, and prefer speak up boldly, and, if we really,
(Continued on Fage 4) 945
મ
delusions.
lectual
snob ea Macaulay's classic
In-
least more
VICTIMS OF SPEED
At the University of Chicago, ex- perienced motion study men were shaking their heads over an in- creased speed-up which they said was becoming beyond human en-
tiurance.
To have some say in the speed of the conveyor belt is what the auto-worker means by collective bargaining.
Speed-up, not wage claims, sup- d the driving energy which pro- duced the miracle of the Michigan strikes.
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