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Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXX, Issue 10106, 3 August 1893, Page 4

Our local contemporary professes to be seriously alarmed about the finances of the Colony, and is very anxious that the electors should believe that the present Government has brought the Colony to the verge of ruin. "The Public Works expenditure,” it told us yesterday, “has grown rapidly ever since the present Ministers took office, and by next March will have left the Treasury chest empty, even if the sanguine estimates of revenue ia realised.” We have quoted this announcement without altering a single word because our contemporary poses as an authority on the English language, and ia the accepted mouthpiece of the “ Old - Liberal ” ultra - Conservative Party. It is, too, encouraging to find that tho " Old Liberals ” are ready to do some measure of justice to their political opponents. Two years ago they wore very loud in their assertion that public works would cease altogether under a Liberal Government, and that the wageearners of the Colony would be reduced to a condition of abject poverty. Now they declare that the public works expenditure has “ grown rapidly ” ever since the present Ministers took office, and they even predict that it will go on growing. This is entirely satisfactory. Bat why should the “ Old Liberals,” while making this very candid admission of their former error, try to frighten the electors by holding up an empty Treasury chest ? la there anything very dangerous iu a country paying its debts and returning to the people by way of pu Soiic works the money that has been raised by taxation F It ia true that the Conservatives have suggested that the refund should be made in a different way—by exempting improvements without increasing the graduated tax and by remitting some of tho Customs duties—but their leaders have not dared to propose that the Treasury chest should be filled either by a foreign loan or by additional taxation. We are, as we pointed out tho other day, bound by our circumstances to live from hand to mouth, and the critics who describe this as “ weak finance ” have no sympathy with the policy of economy and self-reliance. If theso gentlemen had one spark of political courage they would take the electors into their confidence and state boldly the nature and extent of their proposals. While they only snap and anari at the heels of a successful Government they have no right to expect the sympathy of the people who placed that Government in power.