EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 11655, 10 June 1912, Page 1

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Hitherto 1 the Minister of Finance liaa been confined' to the The Minster of deputation ground, Finance, where it has been admitted even by- his opponents he did not show bad paces. Still the opportunities afforded him were, only of a .superficial non-committal chiiruc ter. But lie has made himself an opportunity for showing the real ?trrii!itli of his position. He did so by addressing his constituents in the ordinary course of things. We congratulate the lion, gentleman on the substantial character of the speech he made. 'I lio.se who have admired his tactics on the deputaion ground cannot fail to be charmed with his paces on the solid, convincing ground of the hustings, where he" gave solid reasons for the political faith that is in kim and for the line of policy with which he is identified. The speech has come at an opportune moment,, moreover; at the moment when Mr Millar lias met with I'.is serious set-hack. When a man is threatened with blindness no one wants to do other th.au compliment him on the goo.'i lie. has done in the past, and express the hope that he may be' -spared to do move good in the future. This is the course followed -by Mr Millar's friends. There is a gale at present behind th? Hon. gentleman which, if there is anything in the good wishes of friends, must waft him on to health ; and restored activity. These good wishes will not be injured or weakened' in any way by the. speech delivered by Mr Myers to his constituents. On the contrary, they will be greatly helped. It .was a simple speech, which relied on common sense and a few patent facts to illuminate a situation which has been obscured by clumsy people trying to pass as prophets. Mr Myers simply swept away all the cobwebs which ought never to have been t'hsrre. First, he cleared the air around the royal commissions making it evident that mo member of the Government has ever nourished the foolish hope that these bodies were going to solve the problems before them in the few weeks before the session. No sane man ever expected from thes? bodies anything more than the collection of useful facts.. All the implications and direct suggestions to the contrary have been the outcome of bias and wrong-headedness. All that is expected and ever was expected by the Government.-is "a collation of "reliable facts,' - ' which must guide the Government and Parliament towards right conclusions about some" of the most important things in. our national life. From that point of. view the appointment- of the three commissions is the most important thing done by anv Government for many years. Defending the. graduated taxation proposed by. the Government, according to the terms of the last Speech from the Throne. Mr .Myers easily convicted Mr Masssy of really fighting hard for the monopolist victims of graduation, while Dosing as the friend of the farmer under mortgage, pointing out that the farmer in that position is already in possession of the privilege: asked for him by Mr Ma-'r"-:ev. Passing to the loans of the local bodies, he .showed that the policy must be popular because the demands of the borrowers are unexhausted, though the amounts loaned exceed anything ever heard of under the okl system ; that in his computation of the position Mr Massey has forgotten the sinking fund; that- the position Of the new loans at £4.1" is better than the position of the seventeen millions of old local bodies' loans at £4.11. the new providing sinking fund, the old not doing so: that the old system of assisting local bodies in this wav was limited to £200,000, whereas the'present one has already reached over two millions. Her? the Ministrr met Mr Massey on the bedrock of his criticism, and the result is that the public is convinced mere than ever of the superiority of the new system which the Leader of the Opposition set out to attack. If this is the worst Mr Massey can-do against the Administration, it is not for nothing that Mr Myers reminded him that 48 per cent, of the votes at the General Election of December were east in favor of the Liberal Party.

Tjie evidence of the manager of the White Star ComTitaiiie Enquiry, pany makes one shudder at. its callous disregard' of sense, experience and fact. Here is a man who has lived with a theory which his predecessors handed down to him in such manner that the theory.-has become a, part of his nature. The. theory is that ships ought- to be built, unsinkable, and that it is not wise to provide too many boats for the people carried on voyage, because of the impossibility of filling and launching them all .successfully. So long as no ship strikes anything th? theory is harmless enough. But when the manager of a. great company, after a. great disaster which'has proved that ships cannot- be made, unsinkable, and that if the boats had. been present in. sufficient numbers to save seventeen hundred oeople who were drowned in si<dit of the complement that filled the ■room in the too few boats provided, those seventeen hundred -would have been saved : when in the face of these facts the manager goes iiito the wit-il€«-b.T* and bleats out. the theory of unsinkable ships versus too many boats, it is time for something, more .than, -amusement. Less imbecility has brought men to their eleaths. J'or •cxample, under the old Turkish Sultans a. few words to the Imperial headsman and the production of a carpet 011 which to spend his last moments knee.ing would be th'r onlv reply vouchsafed to the- official who tried.to escape responsibility under a platitude. The court cannot treat the- manager in this way But it will, we trust, mark its sense ot the outrageous character of his statement by saving something he will remember. All the managers of all the lines on the face of the ocean have b.= en compelled by the disaster to supply boats enough for their people. They all did it of their own free will after reading the storv of the disaster; ; and thev all felt like murderers the while. But this one stands- out the exception. It is one of the points of the. enquiry. Another is the evidence of the man in charge of one of the boats, which is that"the captain ordered him to deliver his load of passengers to a steamer whose lights were visible, and come back to the Titanic for more. Evidently the Californtan this.' whoso 'people seeing tho distress lights of the •Titanic thought they were some Form'of nniusem?nt.and proceeded on. their way. The skipper of that boat- must have been the twin brother of the White Star manager. A twin bastinado would improve the pair vastly.