NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13647, 15 January 1908, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

OLD AGE PENSIONS.

Mr. Bernard Shaw contributes to the Westminster Gazette a letter which has caused much discomfort to that journal. For some time past it has been evident that this prominent organ of official Liberalism was growing uneasy about old age pensions. A universal system of old age pensions would cost £29,000,000 if the age for commencement were fixed at 65, or £45,000,000 if, as the Labour party demand, the pensions began at 60. Either figure i;: far beyond the resources of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and therefore the Westminster Gazette, as the trusty adviser of the present Cabinet, has been cautiously hinting that perhaps all parties could be satisfied if a sum of, say £5,000,000 were set aside-for old age pensions and judiciously doled out to persons who proved upon examination to be both poor and deserving. The reply of Mr. Bernard Shaw is emphatic. Either the Liberals* must give what they promised, universal pensions, or they must clear out of the way altogether. " All nonsense about deserving cases and the like ,must be dropped. . . . The murderer whom we condemn to penal servitude for life has his five shillings' worth of food and lodging, and more to boot." Whether the working class advocates of 'old age pensions will be altogether gratified with Mr. Shaw's comparisons is a. matter of some doubt, but there is no room for doubt with regard to the embarrassment in which the_ Liberal party Iras been involved, largely at the instigation of the Westminster Gazette. The inevitable impasse has, in fact, now been reached. The Government find it impossible to give what they promised, and the thing which they now offer is rejected with contempt.