CORRESPONDENCE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXVII, Issue 124, 27 May 1893, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

CHILD POLITICIANS.

To the Editor of the " Evening Mail. 1

Sib,— Ye3terday evening I was surprised — and shocked too —at finding among the Wellington telegrams in the livening Mail, a proposal to raise a penny subscription from the Government schools for the memorial to Mr Ballance. What an almost inconceivable unreality! Fancy applying to a little child to give au appreciable traction of its slender pooket money to help to build a tomb for a maa of whom probably it never consciously heard of until that dny 1 Although indeed it might well be, if the child happened to be one of the elders, that it knew quite well that its father strongly disapproved of Mr B.»llance Suraly we do not wiah our children to be introduced into puty politics, or even int) politic.*, before they nre well into their taeup. Of all the childish precocities that I have read of, not one seems to mo more comical than the mental pioture of a child, sagely weighing in its littlo mental balance, the respective merits of Sir Harry Atkiuson and of Mr Ballance, aud concluding that, while each may he well worthy of its penny, yet, aa it had ouly beeu appealed to to givo its penny to the memory of Mr Ballanoe, only to the memory of Mr Ballance could it give its penuy ! But, it may be urged, theae objections are quite beside the m »rk I Thia is how it would work. The school child Avould be asked to give a penny. It would go to its father or its mother, ask for a penny, and give that penny. Well, what can be w-jrse for a child than to teach it, by practice, the kind of teaching longest remembered, that to 'give somebody else's money, or to give one's own money, is all the same thing ! Surely that is just one of the socialistic confusions which are working such dire trouble now-a-days in divers countries.

Surely if Mr Ballance could look from where he is now on this proposal, he would smile sadly on such a piece of sham senti-ment.-I am, tte, Pater Familiass. Nelson, Friday, May 26.