CORRESPONDENCE.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7963, 10 September 1891, Page 6

CORRESPONDENCE.

A COMPLAINT. tO THE EDITOR OF THK PXKSS. Sib, —Permit mc space in your columns to call the attention of the Linwood Town Board to the disgraceful state of the drainage in Armagh street East, between the Town Belt and Scanmore road, which, if not immediately attended to, will inevitably result in a fever epidemic. Considerable building improvements have recently been made on properties in that quarter, but evidently-no attention has been given to see that the extra drainage is properly carried away, and in several places between the points above mentioned matters are allowed to remain in by no means a pleasant or satisfactory state either to pedestrians or householders. Possibly it will only be after several lives have been sacrificed through typhoid fever that the proper authorities will awake to a sense of their responsibilities and do what is their immediate duty to the residents in that locality. Thanking you in anticipation for the insertion of these few lines, —Yours, &c, Medico.

TAXING IMPROVEMENTS. TO THE EDITOR OF THS PBESS.

Sir, —The taxation of improvements stands exactly thus—Example : A builds a house composed of £25 worth of material, £15 worth of brain and labor. A is taxed upon £40 worth of improvements; therefore A is not only taxed upon the material, but ie is taxed upon the labor he has employed. Therefore, as a consequence, A has to pay for the employment of labor ad infinitum. So it resolves into the follow* ing, as time will prove, that the State being averse to labor employed in improvements by the taxation of such in a penal manner, as shown by the new law of this very socialistic but miscalled Liberal Government, so the wise and industrious must cease to improve, cease to be industrious, cease to employ labor and cease to own land or houses, as to have such is little short of criminal. And also, ail improvements already built or made the sooner they are in ruins the less they are in value yearly, will be the only course to mitigate the penal taxation. Leave your fences to fall down, your houses unpainted, and your land to the sway of weeds, and yourself to idleness ; then when you are and all your surroundings the picture of poverty, the State will nourish you and declare that you are, as themselves, a true Socialist. The Socialistic rags, miscalled liberal newspapers, that abound in New Zealand, ought to be edited by monkeys, and perhaps the ape is there en evidence, the doctrine expounded being about what you could expect from such. Some day, perhaps sooner than they think, the people will find out the madness of their false doctrines.— Yours, <tc, A Colonist.