NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20840, 6 April 1931, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

CHEATING THE GOVERNMENT. "Honesty is honesty; stealing from a private individual, from shops, and from hotels is theft. But tricking a railway company, riding on a tram without a ticket, evading income tax or misappropriating Government stationery, though it may bo theft in the eyes of the law and graft in the eyes of the prophets, is not quite theft in the eyes of the man-in-the-street," says Time and Tide. " If we are going to make our present system of public organisation and public services work we shall have to revise the commonly accepted moral code to match it. We shall have to learn to respect property, whether owned by the Government, a railway company, a municipality or a foreign State, just as we have learned to respect private possessions owned by an individual. The lesson is not impossible. But the case is important because the transition must be made. At present hundreds of otherwise honourable citizens cheat the Government or the large corporations, because they feel no shame in doing so. Graft on a large scale we despise; graft on a small scale we wink at. And we cannot afford to do so. To trick the Government is to cheat the whole community. . . We shall have to be more careful than wo have been in the past to adapt our private morality to our political system "

THE DESERT ROUTE TO BAGDAD. "As the Nairns saw it, the obvious thing to do was to push out into the desert in a car and go on pushing until they found Bagdad, and, sure enough, by 1923, Bagdad had been found and the trans-desert route established," says Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, in a book of travel in which he recounts the achievements of the Nairn brothers. "The Nairns, in their modesty, will talk to you about it as though finding a motorroute across four or five hundred miles of uncharted desert were the simplest thing in the world. All the same, they have made history; for they have opened a road which, so far as one knows, has never been used before, and in so doing they have achieved a conquest which the historic military conquerors never attempted The other day, when I found myself in Aleppo, I went out—through ploughed land all the way—to look at Euphrates at the point where he used to be crossed by the historic conquerors' road —a road now suddenly made obsolete by the enterprise of theso audacious New Zealanders . . . for tho Nairns have side-tracked the routo which was followed by all their predecessors from Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander down to tho German engineers who laid out the Bagdad railway."

UNEMPLOYMENT FINANCE. " The most unpalatablo bill of our generation," is tho Manchester Guardian's forecast of the legislation that will be necessary to give effect to the recommendations of tho Royal Commission appointed to report on tho unemployment insurance scheme. It says the weakness of the system is that it has been insolvent for years, and through timidity and foolish optimism, a series of Governments has failed to grapplo with this defect. Thus reforms have been delayed until a time when tho social opposition to radical change is likely to be greatest and when, from tho point of view of the beneficiaries, its hardships will be felt most keenly. The Guardian anticipates that if tho coinmission undertakes to show bow solvency and insurance principles can bo restored, its proposals must include reduction of tho amount of benefit, or of the number of its recipients, or tho application, to thoso who have fallen out of insurance, of a severe test of need to be administered by some keener-eyed body than employment exchange officials. " The main principles of unemployment insurance remain sound, the system is in the main wisely administered, but imperceptibly it has become so woven into ordinary working class life that to restore its old sharp outlines involves something like a surgical operation," it adds. " And Governments do not often attempt surgical operations that cost votes. . . . Thero is nothing for it, however, but to keep hammering away at the case for reform, and restating tho unpleasant facts, in tho hope that when the time does come the politicians will have the courage to do what, in the privacy of Cabinets and inlerparty committees, everyone admits to be necessary for the country's economic health."