BEMUDDLED.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16003, 20 February 1914, Page 4

BEMUDDLED.

We had not thought it would be necessary for us to refer again to our exposure of the misrepresentation by the Lyttelton Times of the actual facts in connection with the increase of the public debt during the first year of ohjjce of the Reform Government. Unfortunately, the confusion of mind— to put it mildly—that is characteristic of our contemporary when it deals with financial questions is so weirdly exhibited in its issue of yesterday as to call for another mild corrective. The Lyttelton Times sorrowfully declares that it does not know what the point in controversy between it and ourselves was. And then, curiously enough, it proves the truth of its own statement. This at least is a matter upon which it is to be congratulated.. It has at last given the proof for one of its assertions. It says : " A week or two ago we, ventured to point out that the Reformers' stock story that the Liberal

Government spent more money in its last year of office than the Reform Government spent in its first year was only half the truth. We explained that the cost of the census and the general election and the additional expenditure upon defence more than accounted for the ' extravagance ' attributed to Sir Joseph Ward and turned the scale against Mr Massey." And then it proceeds to say that the Otago Daily Times charged it with various improprieties in this connection. The Otago Daily Times, as a matter of fact, did nothing of the kind. It has not been discussing the inaccuracies of the Lyttelton Times in its statements with regard to the expenditure of the past and the present Governments upon the ordinary services of the country. It was upon an entirely different point that we showed the injustice of its methods. It has confounded its controversy with us with one in which it became involved with its contemporary, the Press —a controversy that had its origin in the .'.act th%t the Lyttelton Times stated that

the increase in the public revenue? in the first yoiir of olliee of the Reform Government was £475,010 only, whereas thf: actual amount of the increase wae £673,103. With that controversy, however, "we were not concerned. Nor is there any sullieient reason why we should be drawn intuit now. But the fact that the Lyttelton Times has confused the one controversy with the other is an ,'irnusing illustration of the state of bemuddlenicnt into which it has got. *