THE BURDENS OF IMPERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16665, 10 April 1916, Page 2

THE BURDENS OF IMPERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

TO THB EDrrOB. Sib,—From your cablegrams of this morning I learn with some surprise that our High Commissioner in London has been assuring the members of the National Liberal. Club that the dominions ' were prepared to proportionately bear the burdens of Imperial responsibility!" This may be true of • Canada and of-Aus-tralia. They are themselves paying their proportion of the cost of the great war. But New Zealand is not even doing that! We are not paying our own share, much less bearing any part of the enormous Imperial burden, and no one knows this better than Sir Thomas Mackenzie, except, perhaps, the English politicians who were entertaining him at luncheon on Friday lapt.v. Surely it is time that something was done to. remove this national disgrace from the fair name of tjiis dominion. Pur fighting men at the front have done eplenclid work. It is monstrous that those of us who are left behind ' are not permitted (by bur political leaders) to pay tho cost of our own little army. It must be paid by us in tho encL Why not do it now, in times of prosperity, ' in place of borrowing the money from _ the • sorely-burdened taxpayers of Britain? Let the Government raise within New Zealand a war loan of £5,000,000, andmake up the defioiency by taxing heavily the colossal profits that are being made in the dominion out of \the war, directly and indirectly. When we have done this, and not before, wc may begin to talk with truth • of our being " prepared to proportionately bear the burdens of Imperial responsibility."' —I am, etc., Taxpayeb. Dunedin, April 8.