LESSON OF THRIFT

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 10, 13 January 1932, Page 8

LESSON OF THRIFT

NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN

UNIVERSITY'S EXAMPLE

(By Telegraph.) (Special to "The Evening Port.") DUNEDIN, This Day. "These recurring periods of depression must be kept steadily in view. Wo must never forgot that in the prosperous times that precede and follow them we must not spend all our revenue, but lay past against the evil day. Thrift, the makor of man, must never bo abandoned in any period of prosperity for those pernicious substitutes inflation and unproductive borrowing, substitutes that all governments, .but especially Labour governments and colonial governments, have a strong tendency towards as the easiest way out of financial straits," said Professor J. Macmillan Brown, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, in his address to-day to the Senate. "The lesson that labour is gotting dramatically taught in the Homeland," he went on to say, "is 'forgotten as soon as the cloud of depression lifts. This quick oblivion of the necessity of foreseeing economy does not follow immediately after the war that has destroyedthe capital and has caused the , depression. There is a pause before the younger generation that has known neither the difficult climb out of the depths to prosperity, nor the destructive wastage of war, comes into'poircr and tho direction of affairs; and once they fall heir to tho powers of the preceding generation, they.think,that the universal talisman and panacea which they have seen rescuing their own and other countries out of the,depths—borrowing —is as applicable-to peace and recuperation as to tho ravages of war. Tho bulk of them are still at the stage of life which is governed solely by the pursuit of pleasure> and they tako their fill of it as they see their older comrades do who have returned from the war. ; Tho lesson the war. should liiive taught them- they have not learned; and there is needed after tho-pause a long period of bitter depression with its attendant evils of unemployment and distress to teach it to them. But by the time the next generation comes to, the guidance of affairs, not only is this new tuition in thrift forgotten, but tho horror of war and tho disgust it engenders are swept out; and nothingness than a new war with its sequent depression is needed to inculcate the necessity of foresight and economy. ~ . '■'■' ■•'.-■: "Tho first half-century of our University was lucky in haying as its treasurers men who .realised this and laid up against the "evil day that was f^n*! «Om^ . professOT Shand, who fulfilled tho duties of tho offico during most of the time, was Professor of Mathematics in a Scotch community and an Aberdeen Scot. He kept his balance^ from fees and subsidy liquid and the result was as I pointed out last year, when we roached the great depression that was bound to. follow tho Great War, and the.Government was in such a fix financially that it had to look into every corner, especially into that of subsidies, to collect enough to balance its unbalanced Budget. It thought not only about cutting down or abolishing our subsidy, but' still more critically and enviously it looked, at that liquid balanco of £70,000, : which Professor Shand and his successors had squeezed out of the fees and the subsidy, to be a scholarship fund' in times of need. It saw at last that If it took away that balance it would hare to replace it in tho shapo of scholarships., That lesson of thrift which helped us through several periods of depression I hope we shall not forget, even though wo have no longer that capable and forcthinking Aberdonian to impress it upon us as ho watches over our treasury."