A million miners are out on strike. From the ferment around us one might think they were asking for the mines. Every foul epithet and calumny is being hurled at them by the hireling Press. It is they who are unpatriotic; it is they who are ruining the trade of the country; it is they who are bringing the people to starvation. No one suggests that the mine-owners, who cling so tightly to the last atom of profit which they can screw out of those who go down into the pits, are culpable.
Of course not. Is it not only fair and just that capital should have its reward? And who can say that the mine-owners are any too well recompensed for his risk and his labour? Not the capitalist papers, certainly.
These drew many fancy pictures of the fabulous wages and astonishing luxury of the miners, and marvelled that there was anything left for the owners at all. Yet within a week of the men ceasing work the Press rang with the cries of the miners' starving wives and children, and Mr. Chiozza Money, M.P. showed from the Income Tax returns that in the last nine years the owners had made over 200 million pounds out of the unpaid labour of the workers!
It is said that the granting of the minimum wage would only cost £50,000 a year, which is less than 1 per cent of the profit the masters take, and a very minute fraction of their capital. It is a pregnant demonstration of what the meaning of the word “Patriotism" is on the masters' lips when they plunge the country into such misery for the sake of so insignificant a morsel of dividend.
From the Socialist Standard, April 1913.
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