Letters to Editor June 22 1895.

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE JUNE 22, 1895.

Mail Bag.

WANTED – (to prepare way for Socialism in our time).

One Adult One Vote.

Land tax.

Income tax.

State bank.

Shops and Factories Act.

Eight hours day where practicable.

Referendum and Initiative.

Taxation of every person according to ability to pay.

The State to find work for unemployed.

The State to fix a minimum wage.

Free Railways. Free administration of Justice.

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The WORKER does not hold itself responsible for the opinions of its correspondents.

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T.I.M. - Right.

E.J. - Held over.

G.J. - Thanks; will use.

J.B. - Have abbreviated.

TAROOM. - Noted last week.

H.J., Dipso, State Socialist. - later.

ANONTMOUS,. - May be so, but what of that?

A.V., South Brisbane. - Would like to hear further from you.

J.W., Childers. - Read “Merrie England” on that question. By post, 4d.

H.A.E. Writes in praise of the late Mr. Kendall of the Royal Exchange Hotel, Cunnamulla.

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ED. WORKER – I think £2 of every £10 subscribed in the West for hospitals should be sent to the Rockhampton Hospital. Numbers of serious chronic cases from the West come here, and I think it only right that some of the subscriptions should also come with them.

FRED WILSON, Rockhampton Hospital.

ED. WORKER – This Angus Gibson agreement, recently presented to your readers, is an interesting one, and is well worthy the consideration of the Labour Party in asmuch as it emanates from a man who poses as a benefactor to those who wish to get on the land. The agreement is a hard, grinding document, and eminently conducive to get the unfortunates who are foolish enough to sign it into a state in which they will prove a perennial source of income to one person only. I trust the Labour Party will give the crafty agreement full ventilation. It deserves it for obvious reasons. - SUGAR.

ED. WORKER – A word to station hands: If you see a fair young man of about 30 years of age, clad in Khaki, with mushroom shaped helmet, Vandyke fair beard, hair turning grey, a far away, dreamy look about the eyes – the result of study by the midnight oil – put on the brake. He is now temporarily located in the west. Owing to his representations in the first instance to influential patrons, three new police camps have been formed on one river. One camp is at a station part-owned by a squatter who is termed “the whitest man God put the breath of life in.” The other partner is a relative of the “Dook” of Northumberland and an absentee. I hear the police are quartered in a room adjoining the men's hut, and will no doubt be employed to assist branding and mustering the cattle among the lignum. - ELLERSLIE.

ED. WORKER – I have been working at the Great Western Hotel, Longreach, for the last year and eight months, and I suppose I must have given entire satisfaction during that time or I should not have been there so long. I worked from 6 in the morning till half-past 7 at night. I have to cook for thirty and sometimes as many as sixty people. On the night of the 25^th of this month, after I had finished my work, the boss, carrying out a practice of many bush town publicans, asked me to go and dance. When I replied “Oh, no, not to-night,” he said, “Take a week's notice from to-night.” Now I think it very hard, considering that I had my foot badly scalded in his employ and was laid up three weeks in bed with it, and before it was well for the boss to ask me to dance, and then sack me for refusing. Yet this hotel is supported by all the leading and prominent union men that come in to this town. However, I hope they will show their manliness by treating the hotel in question with the same fair play as was dealt to me by the proprietor. - LIZZIR ORCHARD, Longreach, May 28.

Ed. WORKER - “If the Labour Party want separation from Great Britain let them say so.” - Courier, June 26. Of course they do. It would be strange if they did not. Why do we want separation! Because England is a nation of usurious money-brokers who are sucking the life-blood of Australia. Queensland has to pay £100,000 a month to these English Jews. “We live now within the security of the mightiest empire in the world.”

Yes, that security which a rope gives to a man about to be hanged. “We are Britons.” We are not. Many of us are descendants of Wallace and Bruce, O'Neill and O'Donnell. In the year 1654 the Puritan Government of England decreed “that the Irish as being too numerous now, be sold as slaver to merchants, and transplanted to Virginia, New England, Jamaica, and other countries.” Washington's success depended in a great measure on the assistance he received from the descendants of these Irish slaves. When an Australian Washington shall cross the Rubicon the descendants of the heroes of Beal-an-ath-a-buidh, the men who fled from the burning rafters of Glenleigh, Falcarragh and Clongorey, and the butchery of Mitchelstown, Tipperary and Yougbal will be found in his van; they will “Remember Limerick and British faith.” - DENIS LINERAN, 26^th May, 1895.

ED. WORKER – Re the only J. R. D. at Wellington Point. “ Who is 'lovely women'! Who is 'unlovely woman'?” The old parliamentary hand most studiously abstained from defining the line of demarcation (if such a line existed). I will assist him, unasked, and you can bet your boots that he won't thank me for my trouble. “Lovely Woman.” I presume he means the “Society Miss,” on whom the thought of how to get her own living never dawns, born in the lap of luxury, fed on the fat of the land, clothed in purple and fine linen, educated, accomplished, and refined. They have no wish to vote; they are satisfied with their lot in life. And why not? “Unlovely Woman.” Yet lovely even in her unloveliness. There is but this one interpretation of J.R.D. It is she whom stern necessity compels to fight the battle of life single-handed; she has to face the bitter world and struggle in the seething mass of toilers, pushed here, jostled there: sometimes through hunger and weakness they fall and are trampled under foot; some rise again (but some, when once down, are so bruised and broken that they can rise no more, but sink lower and lower into the very depths of hell) for the simple right to live. Pleasures and enjoyment they have none. Hope is dead within them. All is swallowed up in the one thought, How am I to live! Is it any wonder that the feminine victims of the past mismanagement of the legislative machine should demand the right of a voice in the framing of the laws and conditions under which they live. - C. W.