NEWS FROM NORWICH.
"Am I too sweeping when I say that we have more to fear from drinking and gambling than from all the capitalists put together?" So boldly and pertinently asked Mr. President Delves, in his opening speech at the Norwich Trades Union Congress. Mr. Delves "paused for a reply." Mr. Punch gives it with an emphatic "No!"
It is not every working-man's friend who will tell the working-man this wholesome truth: that the Bottle and the Betting-Book are his worst enemies. When he defeats them, the grasping capitalist, the mere greedy monopolist, will not have a chance against him. Sober workmen who did not gamble would indeed be "too strong to be afraid of Parliament," or any other power.
Mr. Delves spoke of strikes as likely to become "an old weapon like the discarded flintlock of a past age." Good again! But if the workmen will organise an effective strike, as general as possible, against Beer and Betting, it will be the best day's work they have ever done for themselves and their country, and against exacting capitalism and sweating monopoly.
When workmen act on Delves's plan,
Who will fight the Working-man?
Or, to adapt another old piece of doggerel:—
If the Working-man
Will work on the plan
That Delves set forth at Norwich;
Check betting and drouth,
Need he burn his mouth
With the Socialist's hot porridge?