THE OTAGO WITNESS WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (THURSDAY, MAY 13, 1892.) THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 1994, 12 May 1892, Page 25

THE OTAGO WITNESS WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (THURSDAY, MAY 13, 1892.) THE WEEK.

" Kuaquim »Hud naturs, Blind i»p!?«tl» dUU."— Jov»m . >. " Good nature and good senie must ttftx Join."— Por».

It is only a short week since we remarked that Mr Ballance was a fairly Financial capable Treasurer, and alBnbble. ready he compels* us to explain that py that phrase we meant that he has a fair knowledge (though not so much as, ,after years of experience, he ought to have) of, what tbe Treasury accounts meau. His colleagues, as 'We also lemarked, have not the most foggy idea of figures, and whenever they deal v/ith them from the platform invariably make themselves ridiculous. " Mr Ballance only talks fionsense when he talks finance, as distinguished from mere accounts; but when he does talk nonsense it is portentous nonsense. "It is really difficult to conctive how anyone calling himself a financier, or even \ retending to ordinary business knowledgp, can -make himself: publicly responsible for &uch twaddle as the Premier's utterances on this subject. That he can do so with impunity, and without making himself a universal laughing-stock, is due to the fact that his ignorance, though

exceptional — probably, indeed, unprecedented—in Treasurers, is common enough among people who are not Treasurers* and who are content to take their ideas of public figures from those who are. We have repeatedly given instances of Mr. Balance's infantile ideas on finance* and this week there are added others from the report of an interview with him just before he visited the South to congratulate the .Government candidate or the result of the Bruce election — which the various Ministers and "Liberals" who had been travelling about there at the public expense had ■ assured him was " all right." Once more Mr Ballance, by way of showing how active enterprise is in the country, pointed to the millions of deposits in "the banks. There is a treble fallacy in his statement. First, the deposits are not in the banks, but in circulation— an elementary fact known, we believe, to everybody below the rank of a " Liberal " Treasurer. Second, the fact of abnormally heavy deposits in the bank is not a sign of activity, but the reverse; people bank their money .when threatened with punitive taxation, confiscation, or general insecurity in their' business investments. Third, the deposits, arc being largely put in circulation in Australia — not in New Zealand — through the Australian branches of the banks, as any banker whom Mr Ballance might condescend to ask would inform him without hesitation. . ' - Then again the Premier actually says that the tax on improvements A Fool's over the present limit falls Paradise. only on the landowners whom the present Government are always threatening and denouncing, in order to curry favour with the special supporters before whom they habitually bow themselves in the dust. This is exactly the 'fallacy which almost everybody else has learnt to avoid — namely, that taxation falls upon the middleman and not on the consumer. In* respect of improvements, the owner oC the improved premises is simply a middleman:-- 'He does not do the work, but employs labourers and artisans to do it for him., If he is penalised for doing improvements — as he is by the present taxation— be simply ,does not do them at all, and the loss falls on the working classes : just as the beer tax, though collected from the brewer, is really paid by the drinker. The owner, in fact., instead of laying out money in improvements, /puts it in the bank by way of deposit, thereby depriving the country of much advantage, and sending the infatuated Premier into ecstasies of drivelling delight over the very circumstance wbiob he ought to deplore. - ~ - Similarly, Mr Ballance makes an eager, appeal for a little commendation because' the rate of interest has not risen, as Opposition critics (he says) predicted it would, : Hejre again he shows an utter inability to grasp the, very rudiments of commercial exchange.'. No capable critic of Mr Ballance'a finance-has ever said that interest would rise— and stopped there. What has been eaid.Vand' what must absolutely come to pas's,, is "that if the. demand for money keeps dp- the former level interest will rise, owing -to, the withdrawal of capital. But if the, demand for money is slack — in other words,' if industries are languishing, capital alarmed, and enterprises contracted through -fear of. idiotic interference — then the price of money 'will fall, and the tendency of interest to rise will be checked. But the evil which this slack demand for money indicates is even-greater than the evil of high interest arising -from insecurity. •' > *

The facts are being masked for the moment because expansion and activity v are palsied by the pestilent sycophancy of oar rulers ; and yet here we have the chief, of- "them fatuously pointing to the very evidences of the mischief his policy has already done as a disproof of the mischief it is about to do bnt has not done yet I Truly the Premier is worthy of his touting colleagues in Bruce, who at least have not bad his opportunities of knowiDg better.

Two other political gentlemen have recently undertaken to , tell <- us all Tito about it through the medium Interviews, of the urbane and gentle-

manly reporter — namely, Sir George Grey and Mr Eugene O'Conor! Of Sir George we must broadly confess to be getting unmistakeably tired. It may be "due to flippancy, dulnes?, impatience, or anything else that is reprehensible on 'bur part; but as it happens to be true, it may as well be confessed. Positively one may • read columns of Sir George Grey nowadays without finding that one solitary idea has relieved the unspeakable monotony ef the perusal from beginning to end. - . We have no patience with those who profess to look to Sir George as "a 'champion about to relieve the colony from the reproach of continuing the present Ministry in power. We have not the slightest objection to bis being a champion in New South Wales (where he is vaguely understood to -have regenerated the human race ?.nd saqured reserved seats in Paradise for the members of the Trades and Labour Councils), but the prospect of another Grey Ministry in New Zealand strikes us as dismal in the extreme. Of course in point of character and past record Sir George Grey would be an immense improvement on Mr Ballance ; but we quite fail to see how in any other respect the country would gain by the change. The Ministry is being found out' quite fast enough. When its members leave office they will leave it for ever, and any attempt to turn them out a moment before they have thoroughly shewn themselves up would be a mistake. If such a mistake could be aggravated, it would be by aausing'them to make room for a Government under -Sir George Grey.

Mr Eugene O'Oonor is a member without any of Sir George Grey's prestige, and it is therefore with less trepidation that we own to having found the report of his interview veiy dull reading too. Mr O'Conor 'has been away six months, and during that time has qualified himself to inform the world definitely upon the ultimate destinies of several, nations of Europe (including, incidentally, the British Krnpire). He is under the innocent impression— which' we should be the last to disturb— that, to spend a few weeks in England is to entitle a West Coast politician to polish off in a few glib sentences the whole of the military, commercial, and political conditions, present and future, of the Mother Country ; that a trip to

France— which several hundred thousand Englishmen take every year and say nothing about it— suffices to put the galloping tourjst an fdit With the entire machinery of the great republic; and that similar principles appiy to Italy, Switzerland, and (for aught we know) the Bailer. He is also under the equally innocent hallucination that no other New Zealander has ever seen the countries named— except, of course, the Buller ; though very few New Zealanders, we admit, have seen that. "On arrival in England," Mr O'Conor remarked, " I was much /struck with, the magnitude of her industrial r operation3." Ought not some one to be peat home to England at once to see whether this startling discovery can be substantiated 7 Mr O'Oonor cannot really be serious. f'The country population is really the backbone of France." Amazing 1 " The general and local taxation in Europe is very heavy." Mr O'Conor ought to , have broken the fact to U3 more gently of there being any taxation in "Europe" at all. He realJy leaves us all gasping.

The sympathies of all enthusiasts in the cause of education in its Our broadest sense — in other Liberal words, the sympathies of all Unionists, good men and women — will

be freely accorded to the movement now being begun for the establishment of a Home Reading Union.

There is too little reading done — of that there can be very little doubt, albeit that the first to acknowledge the fact would be those who read too much, and the very last those who hardly read at all. We will say at once that in the case of those fortunate, those enviable people, who by genuine impulse or by stern force of will have become habitual readers, no such institution as a Home Reading Union is necessary or even desirable. They are of those who "need no repentance." But strait is the path and narrow is the way that leads to a state of mind so blessed, and few there be that find it. We believe that a man who is determined to read and resolved to read wisely is in nine cases out of ten a man who will beet attain his object by reading alone. No doubt in this opinion we are in conflict with Dr William Brown (a true reader himself, by the way), who presided at 'a recent meeting of sympathisers with the Home Reading Union, and humorously effaced himself by expressing a strong distrust of presidents in general. But if we are so,' we are on every other point in accord with him, and with his well-known and able seconder, the Rev. Rutherford Waddell. ' As we have said, to the few only is it given to be able and determined to become readers. To the many,' added attractions to be secured by gratifying the gregarious instincts of mankind are almost a necessity in order to lead them in the right way. If the Home Reading Union is successful — and let no one suppose that success is easy; the union will have its difficulties, and they will be' at their worst a rear or two after its establishment — it will do a noble work. We wish it all success, for the number of persons in this community who can be trusted to learn how to find in Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Thackeray, Macaulay, Dickens, and a host of their compeers a fair proportion of the ecstasy they now extract from tlie "Mystery of a Hansom Cab" needs increasing.

There will, it may be hoped, be no troublesome delay in judicially, killDeeming, ing and getting rid of the

wretched animal Deeming. He cumbers the earth ; and the air will be freer when the breath of life is no longer shared between him and the rest of God's creatures.

The ordinary observer of human nature will find it hard to deal patiently with the fiunicking metaphysicians who seek to paralyse the arm of justice by thready theories about " instinctive criminality," and the like. It may be readily conceded that Deeming was an instinctive criminal. We don't, in fact, altogether know what would be meant ~by a non-instinctive criminal. But supposing he was and is, why should that lead to the inference that he is entitled to be kept alive in confinement 7 We do not, it is true, kill lunatics when they themselves kill; but insanity is of every type— according, for inBtance, to a recent essay which has made some stir, genius itself ia insanity — and the proved insanity which saves a lunatic murderer's neck from the noose must be of a very definite kind IE the public conscience is not to be outraged and the teachings of sense and justice violated. When we find a man such as Deeming, a man keenly alive to every phase of bis terrible position, and for whose every crime a motive, not passionate, but nakedly sordid and lustful, can be absolutely assigned, it becomes mere idleness to listen to the disputations of learned psychologists as to the immense susceptibility of stretching which attaches to the definition of insanity. ■

A definite pronouncement by a consensus of competent medical experts that tbe man is mad and irresponsible for his actions, and has always been bo, would arrest at once the stern demand for the execution of judgment which goes up from a horrified nation. Nothing short of that — no dallying and finessing with obscure psychological quibbles — will suffice for a moment to impress the English race whom this man's existence disgraces that a man rna> do the deeds Deeming has done, and yet live.

Mr Dugald M'Kellar, at present chief landing surveyor at Auckland, assumes the duty of collector at Christchurch, and Mr Hill, one of the landing waiters in Wellington, is also to be, transferred to Christchurch. Mr Sibbald, recently transferred from Auckland to Wellington, will shortly return there. It is rumoured that Mr Seth Smith, Chief Judge of the Native Land Court, is about to resign that office owing to failing eyesight.

In page 2 of this issue Messrs Andrews and Bevan give a detailed account of one week's cutting with one of their 12-inch double bagger "Canterbury" chaffcutters in the Ashburton district. The firm claim that the work done is unprecedented in New Zealand or elsewhere.

We have received the report of the Ballarat School of Mines for the past year. It is a nicelyprinted work of 130 pages.

— The longest continuous fibre known at the present time is that of silk. A cocoon of a well-fed silkworm will often yield a thread 1000 ft long, and an instance is mentioned in which one has been produced containing 1295 ft without a break.