NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 143, 13 March 1931, Page 8

NOTES OF THE DAY

Considerable feeling, it is stated, has been aroused among suburban bus travellers against the proposal by the By-laws Committee of the City Council to move all bus termini to the northern end of the city. Bowen Street and the Central Library in Mercer Street, the present termini respectively for the Ngaio and Khandallah and the Eastbourne and Johnsonville services, are very convenient, the latter especially. Common sense, to say nothing of the public interest, would suggest that the civic authorities ought to be looking for other central termini rather than removing them farther away. The City Council in its attitude to bus traffic appears to allow the tramway complex to affect .its judgment. Its object seems to be to force travellers to take trams to and from the proposed northern terminus.

Possible misunderstandings arising from Mr. Baldwin’s recent reference to British Conservative policy in India have been removed ’by a timely amplification which should definitely dispose of the suggestion that "the Conservative leader had surrendered to the arguments of ■■ Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Baldwin’s objection to the Government’s proposal for a second Round Table Conference, this time in India, is perfectly sound. Such a proposition would suggest that the Government lacks the moral courage to take up the question where the London Conference left it, assemble the conclusions of that conference, and draft legislation based upon the points of agreement.reached. That was the original programme. A second conference would mean the reopening of the whole question, in an atmosphere much less favourable to harmonious discussion.

With economies so much in the air at present, there is a danger that the distinction between true and false economy may become obscured. What at the moment may appear to be a desirable economy might in the end prove a very costly one. Yesterday’s discussion at the meeting of the Gity and Suburban Highways Board furnishes a case in point. The question under consideration concerned the. amount that should be spent on road maintenance and repair work. The Mayor very sensibly remarked that in the early days of bituminised roads people seemed to think that the first cost would be the last. “We will always have to pay for the maintenance of our bitumen roads,’* he said. It is a truism of road engineering that unless repair work is systematically kept going, the ultimate cost of restoration is far greater than the total cost of regular maintenance. Various economies proposed by the general and local governments should be subject to the same test of logic. House-owners and cavowners know from experience that money spent on upkeep pays in the. end,, and even . the. individual citizen has proved to his own satisfaction that a stitch in time saves nine.

Recent remarks by members of the MacDonald Government as to the danger of pursuing an isolated policy of disarmament while other nations were actually increasing their naval, military and air strengths, have now been implemented in the Army Estimates. Introducing these, the Secretary of State for War announced, amid Conservative cheers, that he could not, recommend the Government to undertake further unilateral disarmament, for both figures and experience were against it, as well as “the chancps of peace and disarmament in the future.” The same sentiment was expressed, though in stronger and more theatrical terms, by the German Minister of Defence, in defending his estimates in the Reichstag. He pointed out, what every other nation knows, that the Treaty of Versailles imposed an obligation of progressive disarmament upon all the signatories, and he hinted that there was a possibility of Germany repudiating her own obligations in this connection unless a different spirit were displayed by the others. These two incidents show th-.it the general situation is far from satisfactory in spite of the naval agreement reached between France and Italy. A new note is manifestly needed if the present atmosphere is to be cleared of suspicion and mistrust