Our own experience , can hardly be unique, and in conversations
with wage earners we have come across general regret and even. dismay at the order for a general strike, It is felt, very truly, that nothing can really be gained because when the discussions are resumed everybody will.• be worse off then before, there will be less money, less organization, and fewer opportunities for employment all this . at a time when our national fortunes were slowly but surely beginning to mend. The miners r case is not like that of men who have a fair and ,iust hope of compelling their employers to pay more. The greater part of the mining industry is notoriously insolvent and it is imposiible to make the owners hand over money which they have not got. It would be wrong and foolish to suggest that because the sympathetic strikers deplore what they are ordered to do they contemplate disloyalty to their organization. Finding themselves where they do, they will, no doubt stand by their friends as their loyalty requires. But what, after all, do those who think the . matter out hope_ from a sympathetic strike? Mr. Ramsay NacDonald once said "All my life I have been opposed to the sympathetic strike. It has no practical value; it has ore certain result, a bitter and blinding reaction. Liberty is far more easily, destroyed by those who abuse it than by those, who oppose it".
