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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9087, 22 June 1888, Page 4

A self-appointed Retrenchment Committee has been doing most valuable service in Wellington by carefully investigating the causes of extravagance, and seeking the means of escape from it, in the Civil .Service. They have been directing attention very pointedly to the lists ot possible incumbents on the pensions' lists, to discover how many, and who they are, that if threatened with retrenchment could laugh at the House by simply sliding into the list of pensioners ; and our special correspondent graphically says that the lie-: trenchment Committee "Are saddened; and staggered at the number of officials still in the service who are entitled to claim the honefit of the provisions of the Civil Service Pensions Act." It is, indeed, a saddening fact that by an abuse of influence, which is very much akin to fraud, the Civil Service has been enabled to fasten this deadly grip on the colony. It has come of the watchful and persistent efforts of the bureaucracy quartered in Wellington, brought continuously to bear on successive Ministries, aided by the official atmosphere and influences by which Ministers and members of Parliament are surrounded in the metropolis. Individual thought, domestic life, social intercourse, public opinion, the press itself, are all saturated there, and sodden with officialism; and for members fresh from the country, and from provincial cities and towns, where political intrigues do not rule, to be able to preserve a Spartan virtue amid such bureaucratic surroundings, is more than is to be expected of human nature. One and all they have succumbed to the deleterious influence, and have allowed the growth and ascendancy of this evil spirit of officialism which has cost the colony so dearly in the past, and from which the colony now finds itself almost unable to shake itself free, when it has awaked to the danger to which it has been drawn. We have prided ourselves on having adopted the American theory as to the duty of placing the seat of Legislature in a position where it would be free from the domination and violence of mob;:, such as characterise large cities. On this theory the United States selected Washington in preference to New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston, in order that legislation and administration might be free from popular terrorism. But, in shunning Scylla we have fallen on Charybdis ; and, in avoiding population, and taking " somewhere in Cook Straits" as the seat of legislation, we have created an infinitely greater evil, in subjecting legislation and goverment to the influence of a community almost entirely attracted thither by officialism, built up by officialism, cemented, consolidated, and maintained by officialism. Popular passions dominating government might possibly have wrought us evil ; but bureaucracy untempered by wholesome public opinion, and uncontrolled by a local press too much in sympathy with the official spirit, has well nigh wrought the ruin of the colony ; and now when an attempt is made to shake it off, it is shown to have so utilised its opportunities and so fastened its talons on the colony that, " saddened and staggered " at the position, this Retrenchment Committee are driven back. Never was there an hour when it was more demanded that the honest voice of public opinion throughout the colony should be made to reverberate in the halls of legislation. It is quite apparent that with the exception of a few, the members of the Legislature have succumbed to the meplritic influence of bureaucracy at Wellington, for they placidly accept the position that further retrenchment is impossible. The voice of the country should declare that further retrenchment is imperative ; and we sincerely trust that not only in Auckland, but in every city and hamlet of New Zealand, public meetings will be called, and that public meetings will emphatically declare, that the spirit which seemed to regard New Zealand as existing for the benefit of those who were battening on public expenditure, shall no longer prevail, that the cost of administration even on the retrenched scale is a wrong to the taxpayer and a disgrace to the colony in its present financial condition ; that expenditure must be cut down to revenue, rather than revenue be raised up to expenditure, and that the members of Parliament and the Ministers who confess themselves incompetent to effect this further and more drastic retrenchment must stand aside and give place to those who will.