Evening Post. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1911* PUBLIC WORKS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXII, Issue 93, 17 October 1911, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1911. PUBLIC WORKS.

Keen would have been the disappoint" ment if the Public Works Statement of this year had Hot broken all previous records. It is a record-breaking age and a record-breaking Ministry, and the Ministry would have been false to its reputation it on the eve of a General Election it had shown itself paltry and pusillanimous in its conceptions of the public expenditure. It has probably broken a record or two in its manner of presenting the Public Works Statement. So much has been crowded on previous occasions into the laefc week of the session, that it would be rash to say that this Statement has never before been delayed so long, but we certainly cannot recall any previous occasion on which it has not been presented till alter midnight. It is, of course, vain to protest against this way of doing business. It can hardly be said that members We to have it so. What they do love is to get home, and when, after months of dawdling, their leader tells them that the way to get home is to put Mirough in a week an immense amount of business, the greater part of which they have not even, seen, th«y accept this blind servitude as the price of liberty, shut their eyes, set their teeth, do as they are told, and go home. So far as' the Public Works Estimates are concerned, there is this to be said in condonation of the process : that if a few weeks were allowed instead of a day or two for their contemplation and a few, ; days instead of a few hours for their discussion, they would ofcill be beyond the grasp of the ordinary member, ot indeed ot any member. What intelligence and what research would be equal to the task of analysing and sifting the hundreds of items which compose these columns and ' deciding which, are necessary and legitimate and which, represent political jobs? "It is the fashion," says our Ministerial contemporary this morning, "to deride the system of allocation as one of 'bribery' and to refer to every separate vote as a. 'dole.' Whether any of the works proposed in the Minister's Statement can be properly termed a 'dole' we nre quite unable to say." In the circumstances, one should, perhaps, be more surprised at the candour than at the timidity of this agnosticism. Our contemporary cannot guarantee that there are not ''doles" in tho Minister 9 little list of Public Works. To the more detached observer the question is simply one of how many. He knows that, though their name is legion, an exact computation is impossible, and that as long as the chaos of the present system con. tinues this uncertainty must also continue. In tiTging that "the Government in the past has been urged by all classes of the community to make these 'doles,' " our contemporary does not put the case for the Government quite as strongly as it might be put from the party point of view, for it must be ronceded thnt Opposition members have shown themselves equally sturdy beggars with those of the "right colour." It is the *ysl£m that is at fault and not this party or that; or perhaps wo should rather say that the fault ot: ooth parties is not the inevitable use which they make of aa essentially vicious system, but the fact that "they allow such (1 system to ttmnin. In his speech ab Wyndham la May Inat yefcf tho Jfre«

rruer hinted plainly, at an enlarged and vitalised system "of local goveminent as a means of relieving Parliament from the pettifogging otid parochial cares with which it is quite incapable of coping directly : wholesale log-rolling and 1 demoralisation are the inevitable results ot Parliament'^ vain and foolish attempt to transform itself iPto a Board of Works. The Local Government Bill, which wotiid delegate local works to local responsibility and 'cave Parliament free 'for the work of statesmanship, would be an immense booa ooth to local and to general poll' tics. The rural voter, instead of being compelled to chase the local member and to besiege the Government for the road* and bridges which are among the necessaries of his life, would be able to finance them )n a businesslike and dignified manner. On the other hand, the gain of the rural M.P. and the Ministry in dignity, efficiency, and independence is equally obvious. A Bill which might effect this wonderful transformation has been postponed' from session to Session, the final excuse for delaying it beyond the General Election being that thero will be a sufficient number of burning questions before the electors without it. And this is democracy !