THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9082, 16 June 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 1888.

If thei-o is ono thing more than all others aggravating at this hour, when every effort is bent towards economy in the public service, it is to find that through the folly of the past vested ' interests have been created which it is not in our power to touch. We yesterday published a list of pensions, and those that hold them, in connection •with the Civil Service. The sum amounts to £22,000 a year, and that is fastened on the shoulders of the people so long as it pleases Providence to continue the incumbents in this vale of tears. Many of the recipients of these handsome incomes for doing nothing are utterly unknown even by name to the majority of the present taxpayers of New Zealand; and what they have done, or how they may have deserved so well of their country, is only to be found by a search into the archives of the colony. Some of them indeed are known, but so that if it were put to the general body of the people to say what fitting reward should be rendered them in return for the benefits conferred by them on the cause of tho people, the reply would be a sigh of regret that they had received far too much for all their worth during the long periods they had clung like barnacles to the ship of State. While of these, and of all, it would be said, and justly said, that whatever their services, they should have been recompensed by those who enjoyed their services, and that it is an outrage on reason and common sense that they should have been fastened like so many " old men of the sea" on the unfortunate shoulders of posterity. It used to be cheerily said, when the borrowed millions were being poured out like water, that we were achieving heroic works for posterity, and it was blandly assumed that society would rise up and bless our names. Posterity is with us now, and if we could correctly express the sentiments that are welling in its heart towards the heroic fathers who have saddled on it the consequences of the borrowing era, we should probably find that it is

not blessings but cursings generally, not loud but deep and bitter—that are entertained. But of all the legacies bequeathed to us by the fathers of the colony, there is certainly none that so moves the public gorge, like these drones in the hive who have been left to us to feed on the honey that the busy bees of our time so laboriously make. What right have we to support ironi the taxes so painfully wrung from us, this little army of idlers who have done us no service, and who were adequately enough requited for their services by those whom they did, or were supposed to, serve 1 The principle of pensions is anomalous, and as contrary to justice as it is to common sense. At a time when the public were asleep all these convenient and selfish arrangements were made in an amicable spirit among those who held and worked the public purse-strings, but what right they had to legislate or bargain that we should pay for them, and that having our own civil servants to support we should starve these in order that we may fulfil promises made to former servants by their masters and employers, is a question that not unnaturally excites considerable indignation.

But this is not the only thing against which the public are inclined to be recalcitant at this trying juncture in affairs ; and people naturally ask why is it that public servants when in office, more than others, should be regarded as entitled to have vested interests created for them in their several offices, so that when hard times assail us we must make them compensation for asking them to retire from services which we do not want? Why should civil servants require Acts of Legislature to protect them against their employers, the public, which are not required by managers and bookkeepers and clerks in the employment of private firms 1 We know the uselessness of complaining now against these things in so far as they have been fixed in the past; but chewing as we now are the cud of bitter reflection, it is not unprofitable to place this absurd assumption of exceptional rights by the side of the hundred other evidonces of the wanton extravagance of the past. It is, of course, important that civil servants should have confidence in the permanence of their positions; and so it is in the case of the employe's of private business firms; and it iy important that civil servants should not be thrown penniless on the world when they are worn out and old, and so it is in the case of the employes of private firms; but there is not an argument in favour of either permanence or pension that does "not hold as much in the one case as in the other; yet nobody but a fool would think of protecting by legislation a clerk against dismissal by the man that pays him, on due notice given ; or of compelling his employer to support him in idleness when retiring from service in the very prime of his matured age. We say we may not be able to undo what lias been done ; but we can reflect with indignation ovor this and the many other evidences of the incapacity, or the indifference to the public interests, of those who have been concerned in the government of this country in the past. Whether it is that the traditions of Government are inherited by those who enter the halls of legislation, or whether the atmosphere there is unwholesome, but our legistors do not even yet realise the necessity that exists for a total revolution in our system of government; and the assertion that we often hear made that retrenchment cannot be pushed further, is born of the feeling that we must still travel on in the lines of the past. Pensions and vested rights in office we do admit the anomaly of, because we see the injustice of having rivetted on us liabilities incurred by those who have gone before us ; but in tolerating the complicated system of government., with its whole army of officers to conduct the administration of a handful of people not more numerous than that of a second-rate town in the mother country, and in listening for a moment to the assertion that this cannot bo altered, wo are ourselves continuing an absurdity hardly less unreasonable.