OUR TROUBLE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21775, 14 October 1932, Page 10

OUR TROUBLE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

to the editor.

Sik, —Our troubles to-day—what may they be to-morrow? Chaos and unemployment are said to be rampant in every land. What are the great world troubles? Judged by the doings and saying of our own wise legislators, who have lately been discussing a supposed breach of privilege, they are jealous of their own good name and their honourable calling {!)• But what of the world’s great troubles? The answer that many thinkers give us is that there is mass starvation in a world of plenty, and that there is unemployment everywhere. Others tell us that man’s present condition on this earth is the direct result of the divine discontent deep planted in every human breast, and that what humanity may suffer to-day becomes the teacher, the instructor and guide of to-morrow. We have still another section that tells us that it is to greed and avarice during recent years, dominating the material world, that the people of to-day owe the great slump; that capitalism has broken down, and that the stability of modern civilisation is in danger ‘of tumbling to pieces. Modern civilisation, it is said, has been built upon the foundations set by industrialism commercialised, with greed and avarice the cementing material holding the structure together. The slump in world values of commodities, some wise men assert, can be traced directly to paid agitators white-anting the working man’s conceptions of age-old forms of industrial life, and the driving motive force impelling these world-revolutionaries —soapbox agitators—is said to be the general betterment of the masses of humanity by the setting up of states of government that would have no need of money. I he working man, as a working man, gets the blame, not often the credit, of doing ana saying things, noble things and wise things, so-called idealistic and altruistic things that are only too often attributed to quite another class. We seldom stop to think that disruption of our social, political, economic, as also our industrial institutions may be brought about quite simply by a class of agitators ever discontented with “ lex term and ever ready to trade on the sentiments, emotions, the idealisms, the altruisms, or the greed and avarice of a gullible people to get what thev want. It is this class ot agitators that has played such a disastrous part in bringing New Zealand to the condition we find the country in tod‘Yn the early days of settlement men and women came to New Zealand to make homes for themselves and their families. Following those pioneering heroes and heroines came the good-seeker and the speculator, and following the advent ot these came the profit-mongers and the exploiters who were prepared to buy and sell the land and homes others had laboured to break or to create—a growrich class—to turn all the .resources of the country, its natural beauty, or its hidden treasure into floating bank credit. It is to this type of spurious patriots that we owe the craze to borrow millions for the sake of the resulting profit to be

gained out of the spending. The earning capacity of the expended millions gave the authors of the squandermauia policy not a second thought. We have been cursed or blest, during the last few decades, in drawing to our shores a class of squandermanics whose one idea of progress and prosperity centred around a State afire with American oil, stoked with borrowed millions. And we have had in the past, as we have now, men whose political acumen, business shrewdness, and financial experience should have enabled them to guide the social and political policy of the colony, and this class of men has done—-is trying to do now—what it considers best in the interest of the people and the State. These then have been telling us for years that we were* rushing along the road to our doom, that land values were too high, that taxation was crushing the life out of industry, that our seeming prosperity and our vaunted progress were being built upon a morass of quicksand—upon debts that some day, sooner or later, we should be called upon to liquidate.

Did the masses of the electors pay any heed to their competent leaders? Did they lessen their demands for further expenditure of borrowed capital? Not a bit of it in the past or at present. It is the same old cry that is heard throughout the land —borrow, borrow! Scenic railways 'arc needed to open up the country! Highways round mountain spurs are needed! The tourist traffic demands facilities to see the beauties of our country! Hydro electric schemes tumble over each other—over which foreign moneylenders hold a first mortgage—and even in the gorges of the Waikato, on the volcanic ashes of a past age, we squander borrowed millions.

All things considered, it has been a sorry gamble. We have been playing - a get-rich-quiek policy, which, boomeranglike, has fallen back on the players. ■ It is a serious lesson that the people of the colony have set themselves to learn anew—the elementary facts of biology. After 50 years of free education, 50'years of full and plenty, like new wine, seem to have affected the mental outlook of our people. Indeed, k they have almost forgotten how to walk, and have not yet learned to fly. Many, too, so badly desire to live without doing productive work that they have forgotten the age-old axiom that “ man shall live by the sweat of his bVow.” i Man’s outlook on the material world has changed—indeed, is ever changing—but the rudimentary facts of life remain unchanged. Man may modify greatly some of those rudimentary facts of life, but to do so he 'would have to sweep away the ideals of freedom, of human liberty, the development of tens of thousands of years, and take the working bee as his guiding star of social and material and industrial development. At present the machine has usurped the worker’s job, and it is quite childlessly ridiculous to imagine that the world can progressively go on multiplying machine production and at the same time absorb into Useful and profitable employment the ever-increasing population of a country. We have to remember that the employment of free men by an employer is merely another form of ancient slavery. The free labourer and the slave have ever been used by the employer for the sake of gain. Now that the free labourer, by means of his unions and associations, has been able to dictate terms and conditions to the employer, the latter, unless he can pass the gradually increasing overhead costs of manufacture or production on to the consumer, has been going out of the business of “ employer.” What, then, is to be the world’s future policy? We are nearing the cross roads. Is it to be devolution or evolution? Instead of man concentrating on wages and profits, it seems highly probable that he will have to concentrate on food, health, work happiness, and those many other things that are now considered as necessary to the well-ordered existence of humanity.— l am, etc., P. H. W.