By MAURICE RUSH

f England’s famous

novelist Charles Dickens
were alive today and writing
his classic novel ‘A
Christmas Carol” about life
in Canada at Christmastime
in 1974, what would he say?
When Dickens wrote his
novel in 1843 England was a
blighted land. His
“Christmas Carol” was not
as it is often portrayed
today, just a sentimental
Christmas story. It was a
cry against injustice,
poverty, human suffering,
greed and avarice. It was a
ery for social justice, as
were many of his other
novels which brought deep-
going reforms.

In the 1840’s England was
undergoing its industrial

revolution and witnessing ~

the rise of modern
capitalism with its ruthless
and dehumanizing policies
which subjected every
human emotion and need to
the scramble for wealth and
power by the rising
capitalists.

England’s millions were
uprooted from the soil and
driven to the cities to labor
endless hours in sweat shop
factories, or reduced to
begging to survive. Children
were driven to labor long
hours under terrible con-
ditions to make fortunes for
the new enterprisers. Child
labor was the order of the
day. Every human instinct
and act of decency was
subordinated to the profit
greed of the new owners of
industry and commerce.

Workhouses were set up
for the starving and
destitute and prison was the
lot for thousands who could
not pay their debts to the
new class of economic
royalists. Dickens’ own
father, who worked as a
clerk; was imprisoned for
not being able to pay his
debts. And as a boy of 12
Dickens had to go to work in
a blacking warehouse and
never forgot the humiliation
and suffering he went
through as a child laborer.
‘“‘A Christmas Carol” was a
cry against these conditions
and for human dignity.

The world has come a long
way since Dickens died.
Capitalism went on to

become a world wide

system of oppression and
exploitation. It created
suffering and misery,
especially in its imperialist

stage, on a scale never

before known to man. It
debased every human in-
stinct to the God of profit. It
created world hunger,
suffering, wars, destruction
and racial intolerance in a
way never before known by
mankind — while at the
same time creating fabulous
wealth and power for the

BERRA RONEN

few out of the suffering of
the many.

Particularly close to
Dickens’ heart were the
children. In ‘‘A Christmas
Carol’’ as well as in his other
novels, children are the
central characters with the
main: plot invariably
revolving around them.
What would be his reaction
today if he looked upon the
faces of the starving,
ragged, illiterate and
homeless millions of
children in Africa, Asia and
Latin America?

And if he were alive today
what would he write about
starvation facing hun-
dreds of millions of people in
advanced as well as
developing countries while
food is destroyed in vast
quantities in order to keep
up the profits of the few?

What would he say about
the huge multinational
corporations and
monopolies who today
dominate everyone’s lives
andare run by the Ebenezer
Scrooges of the 20th century
to whom profit is God and
exploitation of their fellow
human beings the way to
great personal wealth and
power?

What would Dickens say
about the hardships forced
on millions today by the big
monopolies who amass
fortunes from _ boosting
prices of food, clothing,
housing and those
necessities of life needed by
ordinary people to live? And
what would he have to say
about a state of affairs in
Canada where more. than
one out of every four people
is forced to live below the

poverty line in one of the
richest countries in the
world?

Or how would Dickens
describe the poverty and
hopeless squalor in which
hundreds of thousands of
Native Indian people are
forced to live in Canada
because of a policy of
genocide adopted by a
ruling class oblivious to
their cries for justice?

Certainly the chief can-
didate for the role of
Scrooge in a 1974 edition of

"A Christmas Carol’’ would

be the federal government
which hands out a mere
pittance to more than
600,000 old age pensioners on
which to survive in their
final years, and who, on the
eve of Christmas, an-
nounced that old age pen-
sions will be raised by a
miserly $3.00 a month
starting the first of January.

Running the government
a close second for the role of
Scrooge would be the
Vancouver landlords who
are padlocking their suites
and boasting that people will
sleep on the streets this
winter unless they get their
pound of flesh in the form of
higher rents.

‘ When Ebenezer Scrooge
was asked to contribute to
help provide food and
shelter for the poor he
replied: ‘‘Are there no
prisons, are there no
workhouses.”’ And when he
was told that many would
rather die than go there, he

remarked: “If they would :

rather die they had better do

it, and decrease the surplus

population.”

| ‘iMate
CATILE

SItooT.
AND PovR MILK
DOWN SEWERS

How typical that callous
and cold hearted attitude is
of modern day Scrooges who
have the power within their
hands to’see that the jobless
have jobs; the poor and
aged security; the sick and
crippled adequate care; the
homeless or poorly housed
decent homes — but who
callously dismiss the needs
of the many because it
doesn’t offer enough profit
for the few.

How typical it is of the
landlords who would deny
housing to those in need

Richard E. Wallmeyer, Independent Press Telegram Pavilion of Humor—Man and
His World, Montreal.

Bib LEC OAC OME ERE NE ER

because the profit isn’t big
enough; or government
officials who adopt a policy
that five per cent unem-
ployment ‘‘is aeceptable’’;
or civic officials who cut
people off welfare with the
exclamation: ‘‘Are there no
jobs to labor at in the fields,
are there no jobs in the
north?”’

The widespread suffering
mankind is experiencing
today is the result of the
death pangs of a social
system which had _ its
heyday. in Dickens’ time;
and is living out its last
years in our century. In
today’s world the age old
message of this season —
“Peace on Earth, Goodwill
to Men’’ — has real meaning
for those who fight to build a
better world; to abolish the
system of exploitation,
crisis, wars and want, and
replace it by a socialist
society in which the
fulfillment of every
material human want is the
aim of all. Such a new moral
society is today arising in

.the socialist lands whose

ultimate goal is to build a
Communist society in which
all will receive according to
their needs.

The socialist and Com-
munist movement today
struggles to make
mankind’s age old dream of
‘Peace on Earth, Goodwill
to Men’’ a living reality in
our time. And to those who
would misrepresent what
the socialist and Communist
movement stands for in
order to blind the people

with their red baiting and :

lies, one word applies to
them, and

Ebenezer =
Scrooge had it: “Humbug!” 4

BERR RERRERELE

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1974—Page 9

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