THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2004, 21 July 1892, Page 25

THE WEEK.

•• Nunquam»Hudnatara,»Hod wplcntlo .dljdt."-J»v»iu*. " Good nntaro and good "mo muit ever join. — rop». f _he Railway Commissioners are not the most popular officials in the "• Evil country ; but the fact that tomniunica- they have not the remotest tions,"&c. chance of getting fairplay from the Government or the majority in the present House is not unlikely to turn the tide of public feeling in their favour. That fact has been made abundantly clear by the ill-tempered attack made upon the Commissioners in the House by Mr Seddon the other day —an attack in which he was, of course, backed up by the chronically ill-tempered Mr W. P. Reeves. The Minister for Labour (as he loves to be called now that a general election is not entirely off the cards) is the very Dick Deadeye of the Ministerial crew ; and we can imagine the Minister for Mines in his more natural moments turning round to his " mates" (if it be not high treason to refer allegorically by this term to a Cabinet), after some peculiarly sneering interpolation by his bilious colleague, and exclaiming, inthe language of the Pinafore's bosun, " Wotever is to be done with this 'ere 'opeless chap ? " On the present occasion, however, Mr Seddon himself was as ill-tempered and as forgetful of his position as even Mr Reeves could desire. The Hoggs, EarnshawF, and other small fry were, of course, delighted ; but most people will be apt to designate this outbreak of irritation against absent men as not only ill-mannered, but unfair. The Commissioners, of course, must hold themselves subject to the full criticism of Parliament, and mast expect that it will sometimes be sharp ; but that is a very different thing from being publicly flouted by the head of their own department on every possible occasion, merely because the exigencies of a little cheap popularity seem to urge the Minister for Public Works to make periodical exhibitions of his jealousy of their position. It is an unedifying spectacle to see two Ministers of the Crown vicing with each other in calling the Commissioners names, merely because the latter have a lot of employes whose votes it is desirable to attract. Last session Mr Seddon seemed to be determined to rise above that sordid level; but whether through the greater probability of an election, or through the evil influence of a colleague whose back bends low of its own accord at the very name of an employe, the Minister for Public Works this year has lost all claim to the commendation which it was our pleasure to accord him in this very matter only twelve months ago. Speaking of the Commissioners brings naturally on the board the conOur sideration of their annual Hallways. report on working railways, < which has been issued under date the 16th of June. We learn from this that the gross earnings of the railways for the j ear ended 31st March amounted to L 1.115.451, and the expenses to L 706.517 ; thus leaving a net profit of L 408.914, equal to a return of L 2 15s 9d per cent, on the capital cost of the . lines, which is here stated at L 14,656,691. iChe recurrent statement of the latter syrai, by the way, is, whenever it wrus up, an uncomfortable commentary on #ur financial administration generally ; for the net public debt on 31st March 1892, after allowing for all accumulated sinking funds, was L 37.677.619, it follows that mora than £23,000,000 of our debt has been incurred for objects other than railways. Roughly speaking, three-fifths of our loans have been spent upon war, defence, telegraphs, schools, roads, and so on, and only two-fifths upon railways — a condition of affairs which, often as it has been pointed out, is still quite unfamilar to a considerable section of the people. Reverting to the Commissioner's report, we next find that the capital expenditure on railway construction during the past year was L 378.105, upon which the Commissioners remark that " this additional capital for the most part produces no interest, having been expended on extensions of railways which at present bring no additional traffic or revenue, while the expenses are increased by the additional length worked." The revenue has been L3OOO over the Commissioners' estimate; the reduction in goods traffic caused by the bad harvest oE 1891 having been more than covered by the very large increase (L 11.024) in passenger receipts. The Commissioners are very outspoken in condemning certain political railways. Of the Te Aroha to Grahamstown line they say : "It opens up practically no new country and no new markets ; it is likely to injuriously affect the present feeble revenue of the adjacent railways ; it will add largely to the expenses of working. Not only is no interest on the capital spent upon it Jikely to be obtained, but an annual additional loss will probably be incurred in working it." Even mor6 uncompromising language is used with reference to the new Te Aro goods shed at Wellington, upon which Mr Seddon has set his heart, and a quite delightful instance of the stern and almost reckless courage of the Commissioners — a courage which should secure them the respect even of those who don't believe they have suited the country — is' their unhesitating condemnation of "that great national work" — the Greymouth-Hokitika railway itself — which they dare to say will not even pay working expenses ! The wonder is they were not " suspended" on the spot; but probably this is in reserve for them, and Mr Seddon's outburst in the Honse the other day is the preliminary to it. We arc sorry to see that the traffic on the Otago Central " is at present very light, and is mainly diverted from the Dunback and Lawrence branches," though the Commissioners speak hopefully oE the chance* of improvement in its revenue this year. The remedy for this unsatisfactory condition of affairs is to take the railway to" a point where !

it will directly encourage production which at present cannot be profitably undertaken. The attack and answer at the opening of the financial debate were both The good. The Hon. Mr RollesFlintncinl ton's home truths about the Debnto.j Government finance and policy were keenly conceived and tellingly put ; and Mr Ward's reply was spirited, though necessarily it was in some respects forced and disingenuous. Mr Rolleston is sanguine enough to believe that the working classes are beginning to see that their comfort depends upon the general prosperity, and not upon labour bureaus, Ministers for Labour, and other political dodges of a crafty but practically resultless kind. We are not sure that that time has come yet, and are content to wait until the lesson has bad time to sink into the minds of those interested. The intelligence of those classes is, fortunately for the country, very high indeed; and though the artifices of astute politicians may mislead them for a space, they will infallibly see the truth of the matter all in good time. Meanwhile we fancy that for the present, and for a little time yet, their leaders will continue to believe, or at any rate to preach, that the best way to benefit labour is to expel capital and levy a general war upon property. The weak point of Mr Ward's speech was his denial of the charge of left-handed borrowing which has been made again&t the Government, and his attempts to keep up the " self-reliance " humbug which has been quite too much exposed to survive. He effectively answered Mr Rollestqn's complaint of unfair assessments under the new taxation act by pointing to the rarity of the appeals ; and deftly quoted the approving criticisms upon the Budget which have appeared in several Opposition journals. He also lit on a weak spot in the Opposition when he chaffed them about the difficulty of finding a Treasurer if they should take office ; and altogether came off very fairly as an offhand debater. Mr Ward's position about his salary is a very weak one. He apparently likes A to pose before the country as a Dilemma, person who has been offered a salary and has declined to accept it. But that is not at all the true position. He offered himself the salary — and offered it to himself, moreover, in a particularly objectionable way. His salary came down on the Supplementary Estimates in the very lust hours of the ses&ion, in a way that a Minister's salary wa3 never voted before ; and Mr Ward of course knew that it waß on the printed Estimates of his Government, and as a Minister ho became directly responsible for those Estimates, and for the item included therein affecting himself. Now, one of two things is quite clear. Either Mr Ward, in making himself responsible for inviting Parliament to vote him L4OO for the remaining six months of that year, intended to accept the money, or he did not intend to accept it. If he did intend to accept it, and subsequently resolved, in consequence oE the very serious reprobation ivhich this extraordinary way of getting a vof c of the kind through the House aroused in the press and in the country, to refrain from doing so, his action was so far commendable — but only in the sense that it is commendable to repair a wrong eveu at a late stage of its commission rather than carry it right through in spite of public opinion. If, on the other band, he did not intend to accept it, then he stands self-convicted of a paltry theatrical display, got up to impress the unthinking with the notion of his extraordinary magnanimity. Surely we are not to believe that hts deliberately assented to the preparation oC Estimates with this item prominent amongst them, meaning all the time to exclaim, " I decline to take it." Did he write the item with his right hand and practise simultaneously with his left a graceful waving off of the bare suggestion ? If we are asked to believe such a thing, all we can say is that it reminds us of a certain comedy in which a gentleman is reduced to the necessity of buying himself a silver teapot, and getting it presented to him by the local rustics as a "spontaneous" token of their esteem. If Mr Ward wants to be understood in this matter he should be less oracular and more explicit. No one wants to deprive him of any credit that may be his due ; but at present bis position is fully as unfortunate as when that smuggled item of last year was being so severely commented upon throughout the country. The shuffling of the Premier about the Agent-general's letter to the Double Taxa- London Times on the subtion mid ject of duplicate taxation Double Shuffle, may be good Ministerial tacticj for aught we know. Plenty of very bad things seem to be good Ministerial tactics, and plenty of people seem ready to excuse the bad things on this curious plea. But whatever it was in the way of tactics it was shuffling ; and we confess that to us a shuffling person, whether he be a Premier or a mere mortal, is always an unpleasing object of study. The shuffling, moreover, was repeated when the Premier was a&ked whether he was prepared to stand by the truth of certain statements made by him to an interviewer, and published throughout the country as a statement of policy. Nothing in the way of a straightforward answer could be extracted even to so plain a question as this. Mr Ballance exhibits himself in an unfortunate light, when he wriggles in this undignified way out of the responsibilities of his position. But the fact is that there has never been a Ministry which so unblushingly made use of the very fustiest forms of the House in order to escape the hateful necessity of facing the plain hoDCst truth of things. Ever since certain Ministers last session, in connection with the Bryce and Richardson incidents, crept, metaphorically speaking, behind the Speaker's chair after flinging their mudballs, and declined to emerge till all danger ot a fair inquiry into their statements had been burked, these tactics have been time after time pursued, until they have come to be regarded as the regular practice of the Ministerial Bench. We have ourselves i .'^f.-Ucdiy pointed out that the Ministry lut:l oue edition of their

financial policy (per thems-elves) for this colony ; another (per Sir Robtrt Stout) for Australia, presenting a barely recognisable likeness to the former; and a third (per their new Agent-General) for Londi n readers. Apparently they never calculated on inconvenient and inquisitive psople resorting to the embarrassing practice of mentioning the Agent-General's version in this colony, and seeking to know how it could be squared with Ministers' platform speeches. Such a thing was most annoying and undesirable, and the only way to meet it was, naturally, to shuffle. That, briefly put, is why the Premier shuffled The Gladstone Government will be a weak one, and there is very litlle doubt The that another election next Homo year is inevitable. The posiElcctlons. tion is very confusing. The electors of the United Kingdom are so nearly divided on the subject of Home Rule that it is not possible to claim that they have delivered a clear verdict either way. Probably there has never been in history a case where a question of supreme importance has been submitted to the judgment of the people divested in so great a degree of side issues ; and certainly there has never been a case where the answer of the electors has been, notwithstanding, so difficult to translate into words. The evenness of parties extends .to the details of the election. The Leader of the Government and the Leader of tho Opposition in the House of Commons have alike had to fight like grim death for their seats, and have only won their elections by comparatively narrow majorites. The fact is in itself a type of the whole tremendous struggle and its singularly inconclusive outcome. Clubbing together the 18,000 electors who voted. in the Gladstone and Balfcur elections, it may be said that a hundred or two of votes would have turned the scale against either of those statesmen if they had been fighting each other for the club constituency. Then, again, it cannot be forgotten that this is a question in which the separate votes cast by the four great divisions of the United Kingdom must be held to have an intrinsic significance of their own quite apart from the total result, No statesman can ignore this, and we may be quite sure that Mr Gladstone will not attempt to do so. His difficulties are enormously increased by the fact — for up to the present time Homo Rule, though well formulated in the successive manifestoes of the Irish party itself, has been in the mind of Mr Gladstone and his English and Scotch followers nothing more than an idea — a principle. It is impossible to predict what the attitude of the English Home Rule representatives nfay be when it becomes necessary to define in an actual Bill such immensely grave points as the control of the Irish constabulary and magistracy, the right of Irish members to continue to sit in the British Parliament, and so on. The one unquestionable and significant fact which forms Mr Gladstone's strength is the decadence of the Unionist vote in the constituencies since 1886 and the great advance of the principle of Home Rule in the acceptance of the people. He may fairly claim, in the meantime that such a rate of progress indicates the near approach of the complete triumph of the cause to which he has devoted thelast years of his life. The progress of investigations into the condition of certain exploded Great Australian financial comDolngs. panics is such as by no means to allay the unpleasant suspicions which have long been in the air. .There could not have been two opinions at the time of Mr Munro's appointment as Agent general for Victoria as to the scandalous nature of his action under the then circumstances. There was something absolutely comical about the audacity which selected for the duty of representing Victorian finance in the commercial centre of the world a gentleman who was at that very moment being assailed on all sides by the reproaches and laments of unhappy persons who had been induced to invest or deposit their savings in the rotten institution he had created during the boom. Mr Munro, however, in spite of the general indignation and uproar, escaped to London and the enjoy--ment of L 2500 a year, leaving the Real Estate Bank and its unhappy victims to wrestle as best they could with their confusion and despair. Subsequent investigations have seemed to invest the dealings of the directors, of whom he was chairman, with a significance of the gravest kind in connection with trust money transactions, and it is now seriously threatened that the Agent-general for the colouy of Victoria in London will be sharply called upon to return to the colony and " explain bis connection with these transactions." With every desire and hope that Mr Munro can do so satisfactorily, we can only say that for the suffering which such a scandal must necessarily inflict upon him he has only his own disregard of the fitness of things in connection with his appointment to blame, and deserves little sympathy, whether innocent or otherwise. Sydney contributes its share of sensation in public life by the actual arrest of Mr Abigail, Minister for Lands in a recent Government, on a charge of fraud ; and it is now stated that the arrest of the manager of the Australian Bank is expected to be followed by " revelations " affecting "several persons who hold high positions in the political world." The discovery of the full measure of the deceptions practised in connection with the Mercantile Bank completes a record for the week which is singularly suggestive of the demoralising effects of a furious general scramble for unlimited public loans. Any oiie looking for a really good farm, for eitber producing grain, cheese, or ' freezers," will find in our advertising columns that the well known Monte Christo estate in Southland is offered for private sale. It is a rich farm, well drained, and -with all its goodness in it, near the railway, and only three miles from two dairy factories. It is perhaps best known from its celebrated flock of Shropshire Down sheep which for three yeais have c.uried off tho chief imzes ia Down sheep at InvercargilLand Rivorton Shows. In connection with the latter Messrs lleicl and Sons have lately issued a neatly-printed little brochure under the title of " A Word for Shropshire Down Sheep," being a reprint of some remarks which appeared in a Jate issue of the "Witnesfc.