The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News and the Morning News. MONDAY, MAY 17, 1875.

Auckland Star, Volume VI, Issue 1636, 17 May 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News and the Morning News.

MONDAY, MAY 17, 1875.

J?or the cause that lacks assistance JTor the wrong that needs resistance *M the f«ture in the distance. Ai4 th« ssod that we can do.

The best abused man in the colony " is the " labouring man" of Sir George Grey. He and his unfortunate family have been subjected to a course of treatment by all the scribes and by most of the talkists of the colony that any decent man might very properly resent. He has been looked at from front and rear 'and both sides , from above from below and upside down. His inner life and his outside relations, his children's boots and his wife's bonnet, and his own unfortunate pipe of tobacco, to say nothing of his pot of beer, have been roughly criticised, and even his right to beget children, if unable to decently support them, has been called in question. We find that there i B scarcely a newspaper in the colony that has not endeavoured to throw some fresh light on the subject, and if no other good result arise, the illustration has awakened attention and set the whole world of New Zealand a thinking on the subject of the public burthens in a manner that cannot fail to have an effect in staying the headlong and reckless pace of extravagance with which for the past few years the colony has been madly driving. But returning to the • labouring man." ,One of the funniest positions to which he and his children have been reduced is by the New Zealand Times. <That journal says he has not merely four olive branches, but a round dozen sit around the family table ; and then fancy the position of the unfortunate devil on his 5s a day ! Says' bur contemporary :— " Owing to the spa.'Sienegs of inhabitantSj and the natural wealth of the country, the Malthusian theory of population does not •apply here, and Sir George will find many i| farmers and labourers in Auckland who count ton olive branches instead of four. If his argument be good for anything, it follows that every f of tweive in Auckland province contributes £55 4a yearly in taxes to the State, or in other words, that a man •5b a day, havxjig such a family, has nX£?O 16 per annum left to support them,

This is a deplorable state of things, but we can imaginea worse still. We know aman who had twenty-four children. He died some years ago, and probably if he had not died he would have continued having new children ever since. Well, supposing such a man had forty-eight, children, and that he was a " labouring man" and had only five shillings a day. And supposing that he had been paying £4 12s every year for each of them, he would pay £230 a year to revenue out of his income of £78. Of course this follows as clear as daylight. In order to arrive at this conclusion, it must be granted that on ss. a day a man can support fortyeight children with his wife and himself, which would be just as probable as that a man with ten children could do the like, as assumed by our Wellington contemporary. We venture to say that a man circumstanced as either of these supposititious labouring men, would have his income supplemented by the Relieving Officer, or some of his children would be inmates of one or another of our eleemosynary institutions, or in some form or another his family would be consumers of .goods—and dutiable goods—to an extent far beyond his five shillings per day. Such a grotesque twisting and straining of figures show only the straits to which the apologists of the General Government are reduced in face of the very disagreeable fact which Sir Cleorge Grey has presented in a striking, though simple and intelligible way, as illustrative of the average burthen borne by residents in the province. Much has been made of his selection of the man earning five shillings a day, and it has been indignantly asked if that is the average position of the labouring man, as if it signified in the slightest degree whether it is or not. Many assert that taking wet days with dry days, good health and bad health, steady employment and irregular employment all together, £7S a year is a fair average of the "laboring man's" income. But whether or not, what signifies it? This is not a point in the illustration. It was never asserted that this was the average ; but that £4 12s per head of the population is the average burthen is beyond gainsaying Round and round, the family of six must needs pay on an average £27 12s per annum to the revenue. A simple account in division proves this. No one denies that a family in abject poverty— 5s a day is not abject poverty— may be exempt from part of this, of a man could live on fern-root and avoid it all. But if there are exceptions, those Jiving on the other side of the line must pay more. Despite the ridiculous twisting about of the figures, the great fact, —strikingly illustrated by this unfortunate " labouring man"—stands out prominently that, while we are twitted for being a " bankrupt province " for having not another shot in the treasury locker, we are actually paying an amount!|of revenue that is appalling.