ADVANCES TO CITIZENS. Mr. T. E. Taylors Advice.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 215, 13 August 1904, Page 6

ADVANCES TO CITIZENS. Mr. T. E. Taylors Advice.

MR. T. E. Taylor, M.H R , has been telling the House that the city wage-earner can't earn a competency, and that the country settler can. Good gracious, is that a fact? Consider the city wage-earner's position. He earns, perhaps, £3 a week, and has a wife and small family. If he lives in the most frugal way, wears his clothes until the lining shows, goes a month without a haircut, affects celluloid collars, combs the beach for stray firewood, wears broken boots, and goes to bed early to save gas, he merely lifts his "screw" at the end of the month, and hands it holus bolus to the tradespeople If he has any need for the doctor, poor devil ' The "overdue — please remit" on his tailor's bill hurts him, but he can't raise £5 at one hit. * * * As Mr. Taylor suggests, no one takes any notice of him. He doesn't wear moleskins, and his hands are not grimy, and he is not the "backbone of the country." He is merely the fellow who makes it possible for the backbone to live. Of course, the backbone growls, and always has growled, and always will growl, because he hasn't got a three-chain wide blue-metalled avenue up to his door, but that is natural. If the city Chinaman puts up the price of cabbage, the settler doesn't go without cabbage. He culls a home-grown one. The price of meat doesn't affect him, for he's a pretty poor kind of a cockey who hasn't got a stray wether around. * * * No "boss" asks him why the dickens he doesn't wear decent clothes A pair of moleskins and a flannel serve him just as well as a five-guinea suit. Also, being a settler, the Government gives him money to build a house, and no rent fiend comes round every Monday morning to tell you that, as rates have gone up 6d, the landlord has decided to raise your rent from 15s to £1 The city "boss," if he makes a good deal doesn't ask his hands to< kindly accept a portion of the profits, but, in the country, if nature smiles and produces forty tons of potatoes where last year grew twenty, the suffering settler scores.

Why doesn't the town dwellex throw his pen to the deuce, and "go on the land'"* Someone is needed to run the cities. The wage-earners of the city haven't got a hope of making a competency, because the people who pay them their wages want the competency so badly themselves If the said wage-earners could, with Mr Taylor, induce a fatherly Government to pass an Advances to Citizens' Act, the prospects of a thuvmg old age and no necessity for the pension might be in sight * * * Unquestionably such a scheme would put a stop to the ramshackle building that disgraces our residential areas, and create a pride among citizens, who would have a prospect of becoming their own landlords. While city workers, don't have the long hours and the occasional physical discomforts inseparable from badly-roaded country districts, the loss of work for a week or two reduces them to pauperism or a dependence on the kindness of the butcher or baker Landlords won't wait for their rents, and the city clerk cannot go out and slay a sheep or dig a spadeful of potatoes for breakfast The difficulty of making a3O by 30 clay allotment "improved" enough to re-pay within a moderate time an advance under the Advances to Citizens' Act is apparent, but if the Government can be brought to see with Mr Taylor that the backcountry settler is not the only pebble on the beach, and the only fellow to receive cash help, quite a lot of people in Wellington will be glad.