NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16564, 30 May 1914, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The Minister of Justice must have chuckled to himself when he asked the twenty-eight good who listened to him at Hawarden yesterday to say whether Mr G. W. Russell or " a 'responsible officer of the Department " was likoly to know most about the administration of the Public Trust Office. Probably not more than half a dozen members of the audience know what Mr Herdman was talking about, and naturally when he told them that he had increased the salaries by nearly £BOOO, and appointed forty-four new clerks, they would think he was telling them the whole story. But the member for Avon has taken no exception to tho increase of salaries or to the appointment of new clerks. He has simply shown that an official report which tho Minister said did not exist had a very real existence indeed, and that it had a very important bearing on the question tho Minister was discussing yesterday. All this, the really material point in dispute, was carefully evaded by Mr Herdman. It is the way of the Reformer. . . ; ■ '

The Wellington " Post," in spite of its present day leanings towards Reform, has occasional spasms of its old independence. "In one respect," it observed on Thursday, "the Government is suffering poetic justice. When the dominant party was in Opposition it continually assailed the Liborals' borrowing policy, and the critics did not fairly discriminate between the purposes of tho loans. They endeavoured to scare tho public by gloomy lamentations .about the debt per head of population, and they lumped the good expenditure with tho wasteful outlay. To-day Mr Massey aud his colleagues aro getting exactly the same treatment as they gavo to their opponents. It is ever thus. The Outs cannot see much good in the Ins." Of course, and, of course. But it is not often the " Ins" are reminded in this way by their friends of what they used to do when they were the "Outs."

The time may bo very near at hand when Ohristchurch people will be able to send and receive their Wellington and Dunedin letters by way of the air. An aerial mail service is about to be established between Melbourne and Sydney, and, although the flying postal car will be regarded at first as an interesting kind of toy, there is little doubt that it will ultimately develop into a regular despatch, indispensable to the business man. Inventive genius moves quickly in these times, and the years to come will see the uncertainties and dangers of aerial travel vastly reduced. The great stretch of almost level country between the two Australian cities makes one of the most favourable runs these southern countries can offer the aeronaut, and the pioneer of the air mail in New Zealand's long, narrow islands, with their variable wind currents, will find himself confronted by difficulties and problems from which the continent of Australia is comparatively free.

The first aeroplane flight across Cook Strait has yet to be undertaken, and it will be an experiment fraught with some peril. Yet it is safe to predict that in a very few years the receipt of a letter from Wellington, postmarked " Aerial," will occasion no more surprise than a call' on the telephone. Correspondence posted in the North Island in the morning could be delivered by the Christchurch postman on Ins afternoon's round. The percentage of lost or strayed letters perhaps would be higher than it is at present, and it might be necessary now and again to despatch New Zealand's Bristol cruiser to search the Strait for a missing mailman. But these little accidents would not be allowed to weigh seriousiy against the obvious advantages of the air-route. Speed is everything in these restless days-

Really the Reform apologists oughto hold a conference, with tho Minister of Dofeneo in tho chair, and decide definitely what they are going to say about their party's naval policy. Their present habit of contradicting themselves and one another is confusing and a little tiresome to people who behove Hint tho dominion cannot n<lol '' trifle with the vital question of defence. Mr Allen himself made his latest statement on the subject at Lawrenco on Thursday evening:—

"The Government's critics do not give tho people the Government's policy on this question. Who has proposed to build ships and set up a toy navy? Our policy is to train men for the Royal Navy and nothing else. . . . Every member of the Government, and every member who supported the Bill, is as strongly in favour of one Imperial Navy as Sir' Joseph Ward, and stronger." A local organ of Reform snatched eagerly at these statements and developed thorn in its own peculiar way:— "But Sir Joseph Ward knows that the Government does not propose to build a toy navy, or a local navy, or any navy at all. Mr Allen clearly explained that the Government intends only to provide for naval training and that even its proposal to provide for. theso waters exactly what Sir Joseph Ward asked for in 1909 is contingent upon no satisfactory solutiou being arrived at by the Imperial Naval Conference."

The Government, according to this authority, " intends only to provide for naval training," but has a " proposal" to provide for New Zealand waters the flotilla of cruisers, destroyers and submarines mentioned in the agreement drafted in 1909, before the necessity for the concentration of Imperial strength had arisen.

But on Wednesday evening another member of the Ministry had mentioned the same subject in the quiet seolusion of Methven. The Hon A. L. Herdman did not say that the Government intended to provide only for the training of seamen. He talked frankly about the building of a Bristol cruiser:—

" If we think the defence provided by Britain is insufficient, then we must build a ship of our own, but by adopting this course we are not bound to build a navy of our own. . . . The Admiralty says that the Bristol cruisers promised to New Zealand are required elsewhere, where they will bo more useful than they would be here. We must accept that statement, which probably is correot. The vulnerable point of the British Empire at the present time is not in the Pacific, but in the North Sea or the Mediterranean. ... So we determined to _ ask Parliament to permit the building of a Bristol cruiser."

The Government's actual policy was placed on record last October by Mr Massey in tho formal naval statement presented to the House of Representatives, and it is interesting to compare the salient portions of that document with what the Ministers are saying today : The New Zealand Government think a commencement should bo made to improve the naval position in the South Pacific and if no satisfactory arrangement is arrived at before next session Parliament will be asked to agree to the building in Britain of one fast modern cruiser.

Any ships built by New Zealand or acquired would be at the call of the Admiralty whenever war took place or if war was imminent.

The British dominions in the Pacific should aim at nothing less than British naval supremacy for this hemisphere. The Reformers would save themselves from much embarrassment if they were frank upon this subject. They ought to say plainly which of their conflicting statements is true.

Some of the American newspapers reached a fine pitch of frenzy over the Mexican crisis a few weeks ago. They seem to have made up their minds with Mr Jefferson Brick that the " libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood" and to have done their best to hasten the apparently impending struggle. " Saluting the American flag is a mighty small penance to be put on Huerta," said one Western journal. " What they ought to do to him is to make him eat it—and that with a forty-foot flag-pole wrapped with barbed wire; and more than that, he should be made to swallow the flag-polo without chewing it, and then when he is strung on it like a mud cat on a willow withe, he should bo run up and down the flag-pole for a couple of weeks by way of diversion and to show all the cayenne pepper dictators who rule by homicide that this country, while it may be long-suffering and patient, and while it may turn the other cheek for a year or two, will finally assert itself and make the punishment fit the crime." Poor General Huerta ! The worst thing he ever did to an enemy was to shoot him.

It is very curious how the earnings of the South Island, railways always pick up immediately on the opening of a new financial year. The annual movement is shown in the returns for the four-weekly period ended, on April 25 last. After the North Island lines leading since June last by a substantial margin, in April the South Island lines went to tho front with net earnings amounting to £79,709 against £71,191 earned by the northern system. In the South the ratio of expenditure to revenue was 51.26 per cent, while in the North it was 60.75 per cent. There is no suggestion that the accounts do not represent the real position, lut the strange reversal of tho figures is unexplained.