"SCIENTISTS" AND CIVIL SERVANTS.

Free Lance, Volume XVII, Issue 916, 1 February 1918, Page 8

"SCIENTISTS" AND CIVIL SERVANTS.

A Paltry Jibe.

IT is a pity that Mr. G. M. Thomson. ex-M.P., could not have advocated the giving of a larger Government grant to the New Zealand Institute without dragging in a very mean sneer at the Civil Service. "It was not," he said the other night at the Institute's annual meeting, " a question of lack of funds on the part of the Government, which gave £400,000 to Civil servants which was not asked for." "Hear! Hear!" cried the assembled members of the Dryasdust Mutual Admiration Society! Do Mr. Thomson and his friends contend that the State should not have recognised the urgent necessity for increasing the salaries of the lower paid Civil servants in order to enable them to make both ends meet in these days of an enormously increased cost of living? # # « 95- * We quite agree that the grant to the Institute is too .low. . It might well be raised from £500 to- £1000, instead of to merely £950, which is all the Institute now very modestly "asks for. But there is no good purpose to be served by sneering at the Governmentr—and, indirectly, belittling the value of the work done by the Civil servants—as does this pragmatic ex-pedagogue

from Dunedin. There are other things of consequence just now in this world besides the subsidising of an Institute, the chief concrete, outcome of whose activities is the issue of heavy tomes of long-winded disquisitions. The Institute has never done very much to encourage really practical and useful scientific research. It has almost completely neglected the tremendously important subject of applied science. It is not in touch, as it ought to be, with the manufacturing industries of the Dominion. It has paid but scant attention to the necessity for bringing science and agriculture into closer and, for the latter, more practical and beneficial co-operation. * • * * * We believe that there' are great possibilities of public usefulness before the Institute. But the sympathies of the State and the public will surely not be enlisted by members of the Institute sneering at the National Government for having come to the financial aid'. of a vast body of industrious and capable men, who serve the State loyally and well for by no means extravagant recompense. Mr. Thomson was himself a- public servant —as a member of Parliament. —for a brief period. He was scarcely a success in the House, his dreary sermonical speeches being mainly effective in emptying the legislative chamber and filling the lobbies. Nevertheless, had the Government introduced a Bill giving members an additional £50 or £100 a year—even were it "not asked for"—we would take very short odds against his having voted "No." "Let him keep his "skinflint" ideas for Dunedin consumption.