EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10766, 15 May 1911, Page 1

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

When the 'member for Bruce goes on the warpath he often Mr James.Alien, becomes: reckless in

statement, and always on .such" occasions ends with an attempt to make ;iu ingenious recovery./ He. astounded the Dominion with., the proposition that "our law courts had not been as clean as they should "be-" . "This statement requires, a good.,deal of explanation. It is,, of course" impossible that, ilr Allen, or anyone else rfoi that matter, coiild even hint -that..the judiciary of this, country^;is ; corrupt. 1 . If there is one things more than which. :is traditionary and axiomatic, it is the universal the integrity of his Majesty's Judges in our county. What, .then, does Mr .Allen mean when lie declares that our law courts, are" not as clean as'they ought io ; be?,. He doesn't tell us at the. outset of his. wild harangue. On the, contrary, Jie^.makes the insinuation even more cryptic.. Hegoes on to say that it is a wrong thing for a young country to. in any waV interfere with the administration of justice. One wonders ■whether this stern moralist imagines that in old countries it is right to do this thing, perhaps even meritorious. But that, of course, is equally unthinkable, as the original proposition of corruption which the champion" in his wildhess of. attack wishes to make more emphatic. At last, however, we get to the pith and marrow of the thing. We learn in 0111 perplexity that interference consists in offering to those who, administer justice emoluments-which. are not the emoluments of office.. Now. here we have an ingeniously built up system of attack, delivered with tremendous force at the Government which is accused of corrupting the judicature, and when the attack dies away it leaves the .impression that there has been something worSe than an offer of emolument to some Judges which are outside tho emoluments of office. It is not stated that the offer has made-sany difference | in the behaviour of the Judges or Judge in question. Neither is it even hinted that the Judge or Judges are likely to give a wrong verdict in favor of the Government by reason of gratitude for the fees paid extra. We are driven, then, to the conclusion that the practice of offering these extra emoluments is one with a bad tendency—not that the tendency has resulted in evil, but that it may, in some way, at some time in other " persons than the present Judge, or Judges, who have received the extra emolument, be a bad thing. It appears then, in spite of the impression he produced, that Mr Allen did not say, or intend to say, that the administration of the law courts had departed in anything from the expected cleanliness ; "but that something has been done which might some day be an" encouragement to become less clean than is advisable. Now. it is probable that what Mr Allen is driving at is the fact that the Chief Justice received an allowance for his work in connection with the inquiry into the working of the Maori laws' and tenures, and, also, that he got extra emoluments for his work of the Codification Commission, which did so great a. service to the cause of justice in the few years, preceding the issue of the best five volumes of law compilation extant... The practice of setting the Judges such work to do at all,, and of paying them extra for it, is a fair subject, of comment. . But the fairness does not extend to declaring, or hinting, or leaving the impression that the bad precedent has actually had bad results, as it must have had if the administration has diminished its stan- , dard of cleanliness. Mr Allen has, by following this course, confused tendencies with facts. As w-e have..already said, there is much to" be said against the practice of employing Judges in special'work, as the Chief Justice was emploved. But .there is a very great deal to be said for the of the Chief Justice as the man in the Dominion best fit to do the work, which he did. moreover, exceptionally well. Which means that the question of his extra employment is, after all, under the circumstances, debatable. Then, the dogmatic pronouncement of_ the member for Bruce that the administration of justice has become corrupt becomes an unjustifiable and most rash, as well as absolutely "baseless and unnecessary insinuation.

Mr Hiix, one of the Education Inspectors of the Napier dis-

Trade and trict, returning from Manufactures. Britain the other day, had much to say about many things, and he said it in a very uncompromising way... The. chief tiling he said was in condemnation .of the povertv of the provision the Old Country has made for technical education. In the competition of the Continentals, who are "raised" on technical education of a dozen varieties, that may •«- fatal from the point of view of education. But there is another and a wider question arising'out'of btlier. things this returned traveller said wliich has an an even more important significance. Spea'kjng of some of, the trades he saw, he reported women at work for twelve hours for the'magnificent emolument of 3s (3d to 8s a week,. with obligation to keep body and sonl together in righteousness and comfort on that wretched pittance: ~ Moreover, small as the . stated pay was, the masters have a way, ,he informed, of putting up the minimum quantity to qualify for the piebe rates which sent the wages of these poor people,still further down.in the scale. Throughout many industries there is no living wflge, in fact. Now, the mora} for us here is plain. There .is too much talk of manufactures ah 3 trade t'o result therefrom. But it is not profitable to any country to encourage the estahlishmexit of trades that do not, and never will, pay a living wage, even to their smallest dependents. Land monopoly is : hetter than such poverty-stricken iridiistrialism, because it, at all events, will not allow.anvone to be starved nnd6r pretence of* being profitably employed' in Forwarding the flag of commerce that is borne on every hreeze and floats over every sea: Better send -fche, corpses of these poor people away for manure than condemn them to the living, wasting,; despairing hopeless nightmare 'life m death." There ..is soiriething in : the "new protection" after all. No living wage, no duty—-let"that he the maxim. When the tariff comes up for readjustment we ought to make an examination all round h.y the light of that lantern. and if there is no living wage the duty ought to go on the departure list.