On the 1921 Canadian Parliamentary Election 1921

Tariff Not a Campaign Issue: Old Parties Have No Real Issues Says Old Labor Party Campaigner

An election campaign is now on in this Dominion of Canada, for the purpose of electing a House of Commons, from which a government will be forced to preside over the destiny of the country and steer the “Ship of State” safely through reefs and tide rips of a possibly adverse fortune during another period of years. Probably no similar campaign has ever been marked with a more complete absence of issues or policy to be fought out by contending participants in the old parties for “public honors” than this one.

For good and sufficient reasons the political talent of the ruling class in human society has been rapidly deteriorating in quality of latter years. From an impartial survey of the situation throughout the world and of the political timber available to prop it up with, it appears that the intellectual bankruptcy of the political parties and henchman of the ruling class is well nigh established, at any rate as far as Canada is concerned. No duller mediocrity was ever displayed upon the public platform, nor by means of the other official pronouncements of the old line politicians and so-called statesmen and apologists of the present regime of plunder and rapine. And how could it be otherwise than that the rulers and their satellites should land in moral and intellectual bankruptcy once the industrial and financial establishments of that ruling class have gone over the precipice of manifest impossibility? It is quite the common thing for bankrupts and threatened bankrupts to go “bughouse” and even suicide in some cases. That is evidently the only alternative afforded our present rulers and their tools, in face of the utter impossibility of a further carrying on of their industrial and financial game at full tilt. That perhaps accounts for the weird cavortings and meaningless mutterings upon the part of alleged statesmen and leading publicists of today.

The culmination of a hundred centuries of human slavery and its vulgar trail of business, trade and commerce, was the precipitation of the most gigantic, bloody and destructive war ever yet recorded in history. The closing of this magnificent spectacle has been swiftly followed by every evidence of financial bankruptcy, accompanied with all of its attendant phenomena, by no means the least of which is a tremendous slowing down of industry and a threateningly dangerous condition of unemployment throughout the world.

The figures usually offered as an indication or expression of the wealth of the world, upon examination, turn out to be merely figures of debt, a debt that can never be paid for the good and sufficient reason that all that is produced is consumed equally as fast as it is brought forth. Small wonder that these figures at last reach such imposing dimensions that the bubble finally bursts and bankruptcy ensues.

To make a long story short, the history of the last ten thousand or more years has been the history of human slavery. Its culmination has been the delectable affair that broke out in 1914, the aftermath of which is still with us in the nature of the bankruptcy and collapse already mentioned. The utter impossibility of slavery has thus been clearly made manifest. The human race cannot live under it for any appreciable length of time. The accursed thing will eventually wreck itself, and man will perish unless a return be made to the path of liberty, and that sane manner of existence that actuates the life and purpose of all other living things.

Slavery, with its attendant trade and commerce, is doomed. It is now in collapse, and must go down and out. The vaunted industrialism of the ruling class has been tried in the balance and the result can be read by he who has eyes with which to see and a brain at all capable of reasoning.

The most that can truthfully be said for the boasted mechanical achievements of the past is that they have proven worthy of their creation, for they have been devised solely for the purposes of a ruling class and those purposes are summed up in the conclusion that they never did serve, and never can be made to serve any other purpose than that of intensifying and expediting the exploitation of slaves and turning the fruits of such exploitation to the account of their rulers.

In the face of these very easily verified facts, what supine twaddle it is to pretend that the “tariff,” for instance, or such other silly stuff can be termed a campaign issue. It is all too childish and empty to come forth from the mouths of even normal babes and sucklings. Such stuff can only issue from the caverns of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

E. T. Kingsley