Watch It.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 810, 9 September 1887, Page 28

Watch It.

During the preseut week the citizens of Wellington are experiencing—we can scarcely say enjoying—a new sensation. They have been served with their first Poor-Rate notices. Henceforth, in addition to the general and special and water rates, they will have to pay a rate of at least threepence in the pound for the maintenance of hospitals and charitable institutions, and for the support of the indigent in this district. We say “at least threepence,” because that is the rate with which a beginning is made, and we may be very sure that it will increase rather than decrease as time goes on, so that it is in the highest degree improbable we shall ever see it less than threepence, while it is exceedingly likelv that we may find it doubled at no distant date unless the citizens look far more sharply after its expenditure than they are in the habit of doing as to the administration of the municipal funds, which they provide out of their own pockets. With a regular and safe fund on which to rely it is morally certain that extravagance and waste will soon creep into its administration if this be not closely watched. There will be every imaginable temptation to an extravagance in support of which can be pleaded the sacred cause of benevolence. The mere existence of such a fund, which can be drawn upon as required, will have a direct tendency—as experience has always shown—to encourage demands upon it. Mr Gladstone once said very truly and forcibly as to charitable institutions that they too often “ create and collect the misery they profess to relieve.” It must be a constant care that this is not the case with the new fund now being collected by law from the ratepayers of this city. Already there are symptoms of the dangerous tendency in the proposal to erect an expensive building and construct an elaborate salaried establishment for orphanage purposes, instead of continuing the far cheaper, more efficient, and more salutary process of “ boarding out.” Against this proposed change we have already raised our voice, and it will not be the last scheme for organised but costly beneficence against which the citizens need to be on. their guard. The poorrate is now uuhappily an accomplished fact, and it will demand extreme watchfulness and keenest scrutiny of its administration to prevent its exerting a seriously demoralising tendency, and becoming a formidable burden on the shoulders of the long-suffering ratepayers.