Page 2 Advertisements Column 3

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19009, 3 November 1923, Page 2

THE KAITANGATA RELIEF FUND. TO THE EDITOR. Sir, -I am informed that it has been proposed in New Zealand to apply the balance of the Kaltangata Relief Fund for the benefit of sufferers by recent floods. If such is the case, as one of the original beneficiaries. I emphatically protest against such an action. One could look in vain through the history of the British Empire and dominions for a precedent on this score. The Parliament of New Zealand prides itself on its just and equitable laws and administration. but the Government which would bo guilty of the grossest injustice, confiscation, and misappropriation of trust funds—of a course of action which it would repudiate in individuals punishing them upon conviction, -with the full rigour of the law. Then, who could conceive that the people who generously subscribed to the Knilangata Relief Fund in 1879 ever thought of a flood that was going to occur 43 years after that time, or' that the money they subscribed would be devoted to any purpose other than the original one? If there is a balance in the fund it has been dishonestly withheld from the widows and fatherless, who are still the rightful claimants to it. and it is only by their direct, sanction that the fund oan be used for another purpose. Let the Government or any other body beware of the dangerous precedent of the confiscation or misuse of this fund which still remains a sacred trust fund, for the principle will recoil with tenfold force in no uncertain way on some future date. 1 have no desire to remind yon that most of the beneficiaries of the Kaitangatn Fund had to face many disadvantages in starting life that would have been quite unnecessary if the ample fun,ds bud been used for their benefit as it was universally expected they would he. They alone are by every principle, of justice entitled to the balance of that fund. —I am .etc., • W. D. Spiers. Marble Bar, Western Australia, October 21.

For pinning a cat rfou-n with a pitchfork, Beniamin Green, a publican, was fined £5 at Newark, Notts, and Harry Southern, a boilermaker, who broke the animal’s neck with a shovel, was fined £3. "The most abominable case of cruelty I have ever knows was the magistrate's comment.