MANUFACTURING CRIMINALS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13514, 12 August 1907, Page 8

MANUFACTURING CRIMINALS.

Sir, —The above heading is not sensational, it is true. Last, year the Government, bee —according to his own public confession—drafted an Apiaries Bill containing clauses which if passed by the House would have compelled every beekeeper to use barframed hives under penalty. As a citizen, and also as one who at one time kept as many as 150 hives of bees for amusement in bar-framed hives of my own design, I ' opposed said tyrannous clauses. This session a fresh Bill is being introduced containing two sections (6 and 9) of a most; objectionable kind. They strike at the very root of individual freedom, and their tendency would be to make hard-working, in--1 dustrious, and thrifty, but struggling settlers into breakers of the law liable to fines, and if goaded by the- persecution of all-powerful Government slave-drivers armed with a drastic Act of Parliament beyond endurance. and if they in their just, anger kicked out such officials from their farms, they would then bo liable to imprisonment. No one will object to a Government official having power to compel owners of bees to destroy all hives affected with foul brood, I but these two sections (6 and 9), if passed by the House would compel every backwood settler to use bar-framed hives. I submit that, it would be equally as absurd and equally as tyrannous to compel by law everyone who keeps fowls to use an incubator, or anyone who grows one-sixteenth (1-16) of an acre of oats to cut the same with a reaper and binder, failure to carry out the law rendering them liable , to fine or imprisonment. What a number of women and men would thus be made law-breakers! I submit that if a backwood settler, far away from a sown • where he can buy a bar-framed hive, finds a stray swarm of bees in his garden, he is doing a straightforward, honourable, honest, and thrifty deed by securing said swarm in " any box he may happen to'have handy on his place. He is benefiting himself and the State, and yet under tho Apiaries Act now before the House an attempt is being made 1 to turn this man into a law-breaker, and, perhaps in his resentment at the great injustice, also into a criminal. George Wilks. East TamaJu.