Southern Dinner Pails
432 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, I929 ized labor was struggling to get a foothold, and gentle- men of the press were out to see what they could. The evidence regarding hours, living...
...What additional tragedies the world may read when all the facts become known can only be a matter of conjecture...
...American industry itself has pointed the way to a program through which fair wages can be exchanged for growing enterprise...
...It can lead to disorder and to momentary community uproar...
...and, speaking as Christians, we hold that his right is spiritually superior, as well...
...Twenty years ago there were fewer people who had grown out of factory toil of the hardest kind into some measure of economic ease...
...Inevitably, the Moslem counterclaims are pressed, and exasperate--as lately, when the Moslem Supreme Council received permission to build so near the sacred Wall that to the devout Jew the action constituted a desecration...
...Invitably, they have striven to enlarge their claims...
...The evidence regarding hours, living conditions and scrofulous children was also pretty much the same...
...A new picture superimposed upon the old...
...Such a compromise is clearly more mischievous than the most positive decision would be...
...Meanwhile the question of justice in Gastonia remains as important as was, years ago, the question of justice in Paterson...
...It has been a peculiarly difficult task, unquestionably...
...But the very nature of the difficulty should have produced special safeguards...
...The Jewish suburbs Strife of Jerusalem had been pillaged and in the burned, the rabbinical college at HebHoly Land ron had been attacked and outlying Jewish colonies had been raided--all to the accompaniment of a steadily mounting death toll, which included nearly a score of Americans, most of them students...
...But now everybody realizes that it is bad business as well...
...Meanwhile, with the killing of American nationals made the subject of a formal note of expectation from our government to Great Britain...
...The very fact that clashes of a bitter and bloody sort were almost inevitable should have elicited a clear and decisive policy which would have made them impossible...
...But all the world knows now (what was far from clear years ago) that it can be subdued not by its own resource of hectic violence, but by that calm and realistic reasonableness which is the spirit of the taw...
...The country as a whole has passed through experiences which make the adventures of North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia seem anachronistic...
...The government responsible for peace in Palestine should never have withdrawn the garrison from that country...
...432 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, I929 ized labor was struggling to get a foothold, and gentlemen of the press were out to see what they could...
...The extent of the harm done there could hardly be determined when this was written...
...UNDER the present arrangement, this right is, as it were, half admitted...
...All this is no longer a faith...
...Southern industry, a generation behind the more speedily modernized North, is repeating all the acts in the play...
...The speedy despatch of British troops from Epypt and Malta at first permitted the hope that the crMs was over, but later reports seemed to indicate that what began among the Moslems as an anti-Jewish demonstration might end as a general revolt...
...As usual, Communism in America presents itself as a more or less frantically organized emotion, powerless to effect more than a question mark...
...That degraded labor in one state and relatively emancipated labor in another is socially dangerous we have long understood...
...Zionist leaders deny the story, in so far as it charges the nationalist section with "Fascist" tactics, but the demonstration is not denied...
...Geography has decreed that textile mills should be established in the South rather than in New England...
...and since a positive decMon is the indicated alternative here, there can be no doubt that it should be given for the Jew...
...But unless the Souffn conforms with the nation's general economic ideal, it will in the end lose the natural advantage...
...It is a civic certitude...
...Public opinion in the South is on trial as well for its attitude toward the "labor law breaker" as for its estimate of wealth which, for selfish reasons, has earned the title "predatory...
...Less instruction had been given in economic methods and morals...
...the Jews have permission to resort thither for worship under conditions of restriction against which they have always protested...
...His right in the holy places is anterior to the Moslem's in history...
...The Zionist experiment has juxtaposed within the intimate geographical confines of Palestine two races, two religions, two cultures, whose profound self-consciousness and separateness were already deeply and sombrely engraved in history...
...Today there exists a large body of citizens who know something about industrial circumstances and are prone to estimate them according to standards which they think should represent the nation...
...We have no wish to deny that certain sections among the Palestine Jews have supplied their share of provocation in the present feud For the Zionist Fascisti to stage a nationalist demonstration before the house of the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, as the correspondent of the New York World alleges them to have done, was a piece of incredibly childish folly...
...and it should have long ago defined and defended the right of the Jews to worship in their immemorial holy places...
...Meanwhile, the situation at its minimum is grave enough to prompt a deliberate challenge of the way in which Great Britain has administered the mandate over Palestine...
...The Moslems own "legally and absolutely" the site of the famous remnant of Soloman's Temple which is the centre of the controversy...
...One profound difference, however, must be noted...
...WEEK BY WEEK HE effects of the anti-Jewish riots in Palestine will be felt far beyond its borders...
...with Britain's own Labor party (which a year ago bitterly protested an almost parallel action of the Conservatives in China) ordering every engine of force immediately available to the scene of...
Vol. 10 • September 1929 • No. 18
