Retrenchment in Reality.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 78, 10 December 1887, Page 3

Retrenchment in Reality.

An Auckland paper says that it will be interesting to watch the application of retrenchment and how we seem to like it at the first turn of the screw, Last week the Training College was retrenched, and £2OOO expenditure looped off. That is to say, it was ordered so to be. The Board of Education did not seem to like it, but to use a vernacular phrase we "must like it or lump it.” We have no doubt the fruits of the retrenchment roar will soon begin to fall around us everywhere, and many a wry face will be made, but it must be borne as best we can. That there will a reaction, and a violent one, and that right early, is as sure as any future thing can be sure; and the murmur faint at first will swell into a roar of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then The retrenchment spasm must in the nature of things be ephemeral, and, when the forces begin to gather neither this nor any other Government will be able to withstand them. It is the system itselt that is absurdly ela borate, and if there had been any grit in the Atkinson administration it is simplification of the whole machinery that would have been attempted. But there was no grasp of the situation that was needed, and the paltry system of mere lopping and pruning branches that will only sprout out more luxuriantly is all that has been tried.