ANOTHER SLANDER KILLED.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 16328, 26 August 1913, Page 6

ANOTHER SLANDER KILLED.

On his reappearance in the House of Representatives on Friday after his southern tour—which, by the way, has seriously disconcerted some of our Conservative contemporaries—Sir Joseph Ward finally demolished another of the infamous slanders the Reformers circulated during their struggle for office. Criticising the Liberal finance last year and making particular reforence to tho five million loan the Hon James Allen said:— ' We have got into the position that we not only paid 1 per cent to J. and A. Scrimgeour for underwriters' commission, but we also paid the same people £ per cent commission for obtaining underwriting. We also paid to the Bank of England another J per cent charge for issuing the loan. One and a half per cent wo have had; to pay as charges for underwriting and as commission, and apart from other charges, for the floating of the five million loan In England; and eighteen years ago we could do without underwriting at all, and I want to know what has brought the dominion to this position. Before this, in the very height of the election campaign, Mr Allen and other Reformers had broadly hinted that influential financiers, had secured " pickings" out of Now Zealand loans which they could obtain from no other loans, and one or two of them even implied that members of the Liberal Government wero not altogether uninterested in these illicit profits. Sir Joseph Ward mentioned tho subject on Friday for the purpose of getting a refutation of this infamous slander out of Mr Allen's own mouth. Ho asked the Minister of Finanoo what were tho charges he had paid on his own loan. "'The Minister of Finance," the report of Mr Allen's reply runs, " said that the charges wero still 1 per cent for underwriting, 1 per cent brokerage, J per cent fo tho Bank of England and J per cent to the broker who obtained the underwriting. Before he went to England he obtained tho rates paid by all the Australian. States and these were tho same as New Zealand's rates." Sir Joseph then pressed Mr Allen to say it he could make any improvement upon these rates and the Mi nister replied that ho could not. Thus the matter closed with an admission by Mr Allen that his criticism of his predecessor—to give it an inoffensive name —was utterly unjustified and that 1 the innuendoes of his friends wore a

gross slander. The pity is that it should have been necessary to drag from the Minister an admission which ho should havo made in justice to a political opponent directly ho discovered his own ignorance.