The Lyttelton Times. TUESDAY, MAY 11, 1875.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XLIII, Issue 4443, 11 May 1875, Page 2

The Lyttelton Times. TUESDAY, MAY 11, 1875.

Throughout the long and intricate •speech of the Provincial Secretary on, the finances of the province, there runs . a: thebry of Government .so curiously original that it deserves the attention of cleetors. He states it in explicit terms only once or twice; but through the whole speech it bolsters up his facts and figures, and gives him that self-confi-dence which marks the mail who thinks lie Has got to first. ■ principles. The theory is that Government should take in hand nothing that” is not reproduc,j:. five, meaning By this, we suppose, what will produce pounds, shillings and pehce, when , pounds, shillings ahd pence : are spent bn it. He is astute enough not to press;it too much at.present; hut assumes' if te ' .tlie .ti’ue theory of Government

which must ultimately rule politics, in Canterbury at least, if not in the universe generally. “ Many classes of expenditure,” he says, “do not yield any revenue at all; for instance —'police, gaols, orphanage, charitable aid, are all, os at present constituted, outlay without direct return. Changes may be made at some future time to remedy this.” But with his usual inconsistency he does not wait for the future, but has actually begun to inaugurate the “ changes that are to remedy this ” state of things. Out of these four instances of unreproductive offices of Government be takes one—charitable aid—and makes it an example of what he will do if he continues in the Government; and outside of the instances which he has mentioned he takes another, also, in his opinion unproductive —education, and gives it a slight foretaste of what is to come when Government fits into his principles. These do not yield revenue at all; the function of Government is to attend to revenue; therefoi’e Government has nothing to do with these. Such is the Provincial Secretary’s syllogism and the logical consequence of it (which, indeed, in his self-confidence, he is not afraid to draw) is that police, gaols, orphanage, charitable aid, education, and all other things that do not

return pounds, shillings and pence, are to be gradually thrown overboard by the Canterbury Government. Need we point out the gross fallacy that lies in the reasoning? There are surely other “ productions ” besides pounds, shillings and pence. The pocket is not the sole faculty of man. He has a stomach, a brain, a conscience, and even, though it may seem strange to the present Ministry, some people believe he has a soul too. Nay, all superior beings, as a class, are generally credited with the knowldge that money spent on those other human organs, though it may not feed and foster the highest human faculty—the pocket—is not quite thrown away. It is true, that they may hold the law to be completely changed when it is applied to a different species of human being, such as labourers, mechanics, small farmers, and the less-propertied;. the more uneducated, drunken, criminal they can be made, the better servants they will make, the more easily they may be bullied into humility and small wages. What is it, we should like to know, deprives the large proprietor of cheap labour but the labourers honesty and sobriety, which enable them to buy land and be independent ? Would not Canterbury be Paradise regained if it were not for the fact, that workmen in New Zealand will somehow or other pick up the knack of being sober, industrious, saving, and educated ? The chief charge of the view against the late Government seems to be exactly expressed in Jack Cade’s charge against Lord Say; —“ Thou hast most traitorously cor- “ rupted the youth of the realm in erect- “ ing grammar-schools; and whereas, he- “ fore our forefathers had no other books “ but the score and the tally, r thou.hast “ caused printing to be used. It will be “ proved to thy face that thdu hast men “ about thee that usually talk Of the “ noun and the verb, and such afeomiif‘ able words as no Christian ear can “ endure to hear.”

But we beg of the Council, for the gake of the majority o£ the votes of their electors, and for the safety of their seats at next election, to consider the absurd fallacies and consequences of the Secretary’s theory before they agree to the Bills which he founds upon it.'What is meant by the theory is the complete reversal of all good government, and the, conversion of the Council into a Commercial company. If the theory is logically carried out, private philanthropy will have to look after education, police, gaols, justice, hospitals, charitable aid, whilst the Government will attend to all the larger trading interests, such as railways, gasworks, water supplies, manufactories, general stores. All of us who are not governors of the land will become Government employes or private philanthropists. The source of this theory of the reproductiveness of Government is the old fallacy that it is the land and not the people that makes a country. “Develops the land and its resources and let the people look after themselves; if they will go to the dogs, why, let them, the land is still there and that is all we need care for.” It is incredible that a feeling so irrational should hold ground so long; but it has been the spring of one-half of the errors of governments throughout history. Build roads, bridges, fences, and let the people perish. Rome made the mistake, and the people did perish, so that their developed land had to be left to barbarians; France made it,“and the Revolution told her that her people would not allow themselves to perish while the land grew fat. England has made it, and is making violent straggles to retrieved. Canterbury will make it if the electors will allow their Secretary to lead their Council into the trap. Property is valueless, is a mere cipher, unless there be a well-educated, moral, law-abiding people to give it value. For property is not anything like co-exten-sive with population even in New Zealand, and even if it were, the inequalities, of property would still make population a separate factor in the administration of revenues. It is by no means just that a property which has acquired the value, say of £IO,OOO from the education, morality, and law-abidingness of the people should pay no more for the maintenance of that which gives it value than’ a property which has, acquired the value of £lO. And yet this is actually what ■the new Government proposes to do. Education is truly reproductive. The education of a man is not of value mCrely.to the man himself, but to the.. whole community. ■.'" Property means nothing unless our neighbours respect it, and our neighbours cannot respect it unless they be either educated or reduced to slavery. Property, therefore, should pay education, especially where education is virtually compulsory. It will' be impossible for a large proportion of 1 the population to pay the fees which | the Provincial Secretary proposes to exact. Accordingly, the State will either have to pay the fees for the poorer or have to adopt more sirmgent and- expensive ffieaautes, foi;,the' regression of' crime. <: : ; But if the schedules, bp ; the ’ destruction of ■which the Provincial Secretary

seemed to pride himself so much, classified revenues and expenditure rightly, there would be more than enough for education, and all other “ unproductive” functions of the Government, without touching the land revenue, or even taxing property. The £47,000 of Capitation Grant, which is raised from the population by customs, the people are cheated out of; it is spent in paying the interest on the loans which were made for and spent on developing the resources of land; so that ordinary revenue is reduced by £47,000 for the sake of making the land revenue appear to pay for the deficit of ordinary expenditure. And this last is one of the strongest points of the Provincial Secretary’s speech, viz., that the ordinary revenue is not sufficient to pay for ordinary expenditure. Thus he seems to make out that the revenue is bankrupt; while, in reality, if property paid the interest on the loans which have given it its increased value, ordinary revenue would be quite sufficient for ordinary expenditure. The Secretary, in the earlier part of his speech, inconsistently grants this; “public plantations, the Public Works “ Department, and other, are fairly “ chargeable, not to ordinary, but to “ land revenue, and the same may per- “ haps also be said of the chief part of “ the permanent charges, viz., the “ interest on debentures, consolidated “ and unconsolidatedand yet he goes on to prove that ordinary revenue falls far below ordinary expenditure, and makes it one of the chief reasons for increasing school fees, instead of taxing property. Thus small propertied and poor people will have to pay, because largely propertied men wish the Government to bring railways and roads up to their doors. If the twenty or thirty thousand which the branch railways have lost for us were paid up to the revenue by those who ought to pay up for it, we mean those largely propertied men who demanded "the branches and who ought to have made them themselves by private enterprise—by the way, when is Mr Vogel’s Ordinance, to make lands through which a branch railway passes pay its deficit, to come into force P—then ordinary revenue would be far from bankruptcy. But the people who have had first of all to give up the price of the land that belongs naturally to them, in order to develop the resources of the largely propertied, and then to pay the interest on loans for the cheap carriage of these resources, are to be saddled with the price of the education, justice, police, and other measures that make property safe; nay more, they are accused of being bankrupt and of loafing on the land revenue. Will electors, the large majority of whom are wronged in this policy, tolerate it longer ?