THE New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1891. MONEY-LENDERS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1033, 18 December 1891, Page 22

THE New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1891. MONEY-LENDERS.

There are moneylenders and moneylenders. There is the greatlender who is satisfied with small interest and large security, and there is the small moneylender who seeks to make up for small security by exacting large interest. To put the ease more directly, moneylenders are divided into lenders proper and usurers. Not many years ago the lenders proper approached near to the ways of the usurers, lending at 12 per cent, interest, 10 per cent, commission, rendering accounts half yearly, and charging interest upon interest in the manner against which laws were once levelled. But the change of circumstances, the disappearance of the victims who were killed by the process, and the warnings raised in consequence on all the financial fingerposts, all made a combination of causes which put an end to the indulgence in usurious instinct by the mercantile moneylenders. The other gentleman remained, and to this day justifies his position by the boast of Dogberry —“ one that hath had losses, sir.” A large section of the followers of the Government has habitually expressed the greatest distrust of the large moneylender. Notwithstanding the superior turn taken of late years by his ways, irrespective of the fact that his business of lending has largely gone into the hands of companies whose object in life is borrowing at one rate of interest to lend at another, this political section hates the moneylender. He brands him as the friend of the monopolist ; to him he swears is due the possibility of the “ dog-in-the-manger ” policies which lock up settlement. Landowners are his bondslaves, he avers, while the bona fide settler lies by the hedge fasting and cursing his fate. If a member of the class finds his way into Parliament, nothing that he says can be accepted as true; everything that he does is attributed to his position. He is not a free agent; on the contrary he is the slave of selfinterest ; let him not be trusted. It 13 an attitude very readily comprehensible. We understand it to be narrow aud contemptible in the lowest degree, because it denies to a man the independence of thought which is his by inheritance, and withholds from him the fairness of judgment to which the lowest criminals are entitled. Numberless instances could be quoted from the last volume of Hansard. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the doctrine which these contemptible references represent has been encouraged by the other .side of politics. The_ chief reason why Captain Russell is not in the position he has earned, and for which he is fitted more than any man on his side of the House, the position of leader of the Opposition, is that Captain Russell is a large landowner. The Opposition was actually cowardly enough to be influenced by what we have referred to as the most contemptible of all reasons. However, it matters little what the sanction received may be ; the great fact is that the practice is bad. But bad as it is, we have a right to ask why is it not kept up with consistency. In the electoral field of Wellington there is at present a candidate who represents one division of the money-lending classes. Not the division to which the friends of the Government are hostile, not the division whose words and actions the friends of the Government have discredited by every means in their power ; not the division which th friends of the Government habitually misrepresent as totally unworthy of credit of any kind. No ; that candidate belongs to the other division, the small and more usurious division which has no right to be better treated than the other. Yet a member of this division of moneylenders is eagerly seized up into the heaven of Ministerial favour, he is vouched for as, notwithstanding his profession, the pink of perfection, of disinterested honesty, of chivalrous fidelity to principle. And this not only in the face of his profession, but in the face of the fact that he has no record whatever to justify anything that may be said of-him, good, had, or indifferent. Nay more, this man is not only wrapt up into this heaven of Government favour; he is

forced by the Government influence on to the Labour organisations of the city. He is, in other words, forced on to the organisations whose members supply the chief part of the field by which his and kindred money-lending institutions live by the practice of usury. The principle appears to be, “Hate a moneylender who lends to the wealthy, but embrace a usurer who devours the poor.” To put it another way, “ the man who charges six per cent, is a monopolist, but the man who charges sixty per cent, is an archangel.” And this is the logic with which the free men of this city are invited to surrender their freedom of choice into the hands of those who are worked by the Party wirepullers. To fill the cup of logical and political iniquity, the labour organisations of other places are invited to throw the weight of their influence on the side of this strangely chosen candidate. At this point we stop for breath. We can only say one thing: it is that, like Mr McArthur, M.P., we have every conti - dence in the commonsense and public spirit of the men who make up the Labour Party.