Readers Write

Northern Advocate, 2 December 1944, Page 4

Readers Write

It is very encouraging indeed' for us to see your sustained and intelligent interest in afforestation matters

AFFORESTATION.

particularly as it affects Northland. We feel

that some day the public will realise the great help that the "Advocate” has been. We are indeed fortunate ro have a paper in Whangarei that can appreciate the terrible ravages ahead unless an effort is made to replant outhills and valleys soon. We note also with interest your report of November 11 of the meeting of the Bay of Islands County Council in which Mr S. N. Clark has drawn attention to the wholesale cutting or miro and taraire. and the consequent loss of feed to our native pigeon and tui. This is serious enough, and. for this reason alone, the practice should be stopped. It would be as well for us to take t a page from Sweden’s note-book: “For every native tree cut down, there should be at least two planted in its place.” It is encouraging to us to see interest taken in the subject by county councils and other local bodies We hope the Bay of Islands County Council’s efforts will be successful and we would urge all local bodies who have the interest of New Zealand at heart to make urgent appeals to the Government to at once introduce a comprehensive scheme for the planting out cf native trees.—For THE NORTH AUCKLAND FOREST SOCIETY (Harold Menzies, Member).

Your correspondent, E. Woolhouse, before proclaiming that the abolition of interest would do injury to a great-

BEBT-FREE money

er number than it would benefit, should consider history (bearing in mind how his-

tory repeats itself). He would then see that interest and debt in perpetuity eventually ruin all countries that cling to them. In ancient Greece the plight of the cultivator (then, as now, the backbone of any country) under the burden of interest-bearing debt became so terrible that most of the land he farmed became a desert. In the closing era of the Roman Republic, the entire republic was owned by about 12 money-lending families, and the severe Roman- laws of debt dispossessed the small farmer and cultivator and sowed the seeds of Rome's decay. Libya, once called the “Granary of Rome,” is now largely desert, for what land could stand the merciless continual cropping enforced by usury.

In our own times we know that the land of most of the countries of the world is going the same way as these old civilisations —slowly, because rates of interest are not so high, but just as surely; and it will continue to do so until we have a financial system under which the new money necessary for national purposes and to maintain the people’s purchasing power at the level of our ability to produce, comes into existence not as debt but as a public service under the control of a responsible public authority.

Mr Woolhouse claims that the increased volume of money now circulating has its origin other than as bank-created credit, but admits that bank deposits have risen, so a quotation from Mr Reginald McKenna (a recognised banking authority) should clear this point. He said: “There is only one method by which we can add to or diminish the aggregate amount of our money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the actions of the banks in increasing or diminishing deposits. We know how this is effected. Every bank loan and every bank purchase of securities creates a deposit, and every repayment of a bank loan and every bank sale destroys one." —L. CANN.