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Oamaru Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 5085, 22 September 1891, Page 2

A CEN'TLICMAN, who has exceptional opportunity of judging, informs the Southern Standard that only a . dozen persons in the Gore district will be injuriously affected by the new taxation. An overwhelming number of the other settlers will be benefited ; some to a considerable extent. The dozen settlers, says our contemporary, will not really be injured—they will only pay their fair share of the taxation of the colony ; but that will necessitate their contributing more than they have heretofore done under the Property Tax. That is just where this taxation shoe pinches. The man who carelessly collides with a fellow foot passenger and cannons him into the ditch, finds it convenient to adopt the role of the injured one himself, and to soundly abuse the real sufferer for his abominable carelessness in getting in the way. Similarly if you tread on a man's pet corn the shortest way out of the difficulty is to accuse him of putting his great ugly feet under yours. A definition of "injury" is all that is required, and a little gentle bluff, a specious parade of unutterable martyrdom and an assumption of "injured innocence," are all that are required to command the sympathies of a number of the unthinking public. "Man is a reasoning animal," we are told, but, unfortunately, his reasoning does not always go far enough, or is based on artfully propouuded premises whose chief feature is mendacity. The opponents of the Taxation Bill have been uttering furious tirades of abuse at the Government's determined stand against being elbowed out of the way. These gentlemen insist, with breathless exclamations of horror, that itmler the new system of taxation some people will actually pay more than under the original scheme. Then a halo and a mantle of indignation, and other things, come down and encircle them, and a pedestal gets under their feet, and a great column of shrieking statistics conies along and proves what they say, and the atmosphere reeks with smug smiles, and an odour of virtuous sanctity impregnates the air for miles around. But nobody ever wanted to deny the fact that taxation would in certain cases be increased. The new Bill was framed with the very intention of making these individuals pay more than they had been doing, for the simple reason that they had not paid enough in the past. And if past sins are to be the criterion of future virtue, the sooner we " slump down in our tracks," and wait for somebody to come along out of space and trip the world up and shake those over-ripe logicians off, the better for those unintelligent ones who remain, and who will be content to live on laboring under the extraordinary delusion that when prevention is too late cure is advisable.