The Coming Struggle.

There is great necessity for the Association's help. The outlook in the world is not cheering. People absorbed in money making and self-indulgence, and people whose knowledge of current events is bounded by the horizon of their own little district, smile at any expressed misgivings about the future; but those who have been close observers of men, things, and events, and are discerners of the signs of the times, realise that even before this decade terminates we may have such a social and political eruption as may involve the old order in ruin. Even in England the police and the household troops mutiny; in Germany, in spite of his threats to shoot "Westphalian miners, the Emperor's palace has been besieged with thousands of rioters; Poland is kept down with 170,000 Russian troops; Austria and Italy are alarmed at the social unrest of their people; France is in a war with Anarchists; Australia has labour and poverty problems, that may make the approaching season one of the blackest in her history; an armed labour struggle rages in America; and New Zealand has a legacy of class feeling from the last strike, which renders a large section dangerously sensitive to labour and Socialistic disturbances elsewhere. Never before was there such universal unrest, distrust, and impatience as to-day.

Fortunately, things are not very bad in New Zealand. Elsewhere they are bad enough.