THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2006, 4 August 1892, Page 25

THE WEEK.

•■ Nuuqu.im allud nnturn, atlad saplentladlxlt."— Juv«n*i " Good nnturo and good icnso must ever Join."— Pop*.

Mr Ballance's explanation of his threat to take away the subsidies to The local bodies badly needs exllntcpajcrs' plaining. The language of Pockets. the Financial Statement is

plain :—": — " I think the local bodies ought to be prepared next year to give up one-half the amount of the present subsidy, and that in the following year but one the remainder should disappear." The language of the subsequent " explanation" to an interviewer is of the kind to which Mr Ballance (like others of his colleagues) is accustomed to resort when inconvenient public notice is taken of any of bis announcements. It is vague and shadowy, and may mean anything 1 ; or possibly, and more probably, nothing.

The change, Mr Ballance says, " ought not to be made without due notice, and time should be given to make other arrangements." He has accordingly given the notice, and we suppose that " the time to make other arrangements" has already be^un. Local bodies which don't promptly make them will, apparently, be told when their next subsidy is due and not forthcoming that they had "due notice," and that the Government presumes they are ready with their " other arrangements." Mr Ballanee appears to think the giving of time — that i<», between now and next jear — is in all respects as good for a mere local body as the eiviug of money. In spite of the adage touching the identity of the two articles, however, it is conceivable that there may be local bodies unpatriotic enough to prefer the latter to the former. These grasping bodies will, however, be disappointed, and the already much diminished dole — representing a fourih uf the mm promised them in consideration of their assuming the heavy burden of Hospitals and Charitable Aid — will duly disappear, if Mr Ballance has his way, in order that the surplus for public works (under the absurdly miscalled "co-opera-tive " system) may be swelled for the purchase of political support. The " other arraDgemeuts " will develop themselves, as they did when Mr Ballance was in office before, iuto enlarged powers of rating — a blessing, so Lr as the ratepayers are concerucd, very much disguised indeed. We admit th.ic the whole thing is quite consistent, with the clear deturmination to pile up taxation on the occupiers oi the soil, both for the Wellington Government and for local rating. That is the kind of thing, and pretty nearly the only kind, in which the Government is consistent at all — and the Government has its very pressing reasons for maintaining such consistency

Thnt Submerged "Tenth."

From a cursory perusal of the new compilation of papers on the subject of native claims in the South Island, it would appear that the Maoris have employed a somuwbafc industrious typo of lawyer to prepare their case, and that there has been at least a fairly plausible case to prepare. The country is in effect, being called upon to pay up on a promissory note issued 50 years ago, assuring a tenth of its substance to the original native lords. We all know that in ordinary commerce similar events are always liable to happen ; and when they do happen they invariably hit the victim considerably harder than any corresponding failure of his contemporary speculations.

In the present case all the parties to the original promissory note are dead, except the veteran Sir George Grey, who can hardly be expected to throw much light in 1892 upon the gubernatorial formalities taken over by him long ago from his deceased predecessor of 1843. Hence the present generation, if it should be found leally liable to make good the arrangements suggested in these papers, will not even hive the poor satisfaction of finding anybody to abuse. They will be in the position of the shareholders in an A istralian (we bad ntarly written any Australian) bank, when its managing director bai vanished into space, or taken a cruise to Honolulu and Souta America in a stolen yacht, or been made Agent-general in London for his trustful and ingenuous country. They may shake their fists and mutter awful things, but though the French have a proverb that " JLes absent ont toujuurs tort, 1 ' there is no doubt that in many cases the absent are, in the slang sense of the word, " right."

Punch bad a cartoon at the time of the Berlin Conference, when some awkward complications had arisen, representing the late Lord Beaconsfield whispering behind his hand to hits colleague, the Marquis of Salisbury, " I say — what'a the French for compromise ? " We do not know if ihe Hon. Mr Cadman, who is to investigate these Native claims after the session, is more expert at the Maori tongue than Dizzy was at the French. If he should happan to be equally rusty at the business, however, we trust there is no harm in suggestirg that before lie comes down he should look up the mythical Government Maori Dictionary which h.is cost co mucb, and learn to pronounce with satisfactory glibuess the native equivalent for that useful term.

Snubbed

The Government continues its absurd efforts to burke and conceal everything which tends to show its policy in a true light. It is difficult to'conceive how Ministers can have been so foolish as to court an inevitable snubbing by opposing, as they did, the printing of a simple petition to the House from the Canterbury Farmers' League. No doubt they will plead that they did not in 'bo many words oppose the printing. They seem to have had a considerable fear that even their majority would not stand that; and so, while placing every possible obstiuction in the way of so ordinary an affair as the printing of a petition, and speaking and voting against it with all their might, they went througtf the form of denying that they really meant to prevent its publication, in order to save their credit, if possible, whichever way the vote went. These tactics did not save them from a strong lesson on the part of the House, which decided by a majority of two to one in favour of letting even a country settler have a word to say by way of humble petition in the matter of the affau'3 of the country he lives in.

This little incident shows, as Mr Thomas Mackenzie, member for the Clutha, very truly said, what the country settlers have to expect at the hands of the present Government. The settlers have been deluded, by methods of which perhaps the less said now tho better, into yielding up their rights and interests into antagonistic hands ; and now, it would seem, it is hardly worth the while of those who have induced and benefited by the process to be even barely civil to the class they have misled. The Canterbury Farmers' League is therefore subjected to all the Ministerial powers of coercion and suppression ; their petition to the House is contemptuously burked, and every effort made to pigeon-bole and conceal it. What possible harm could it have done to let the petition be printed in the ordinary way, even if its statements were unpalatable to Ministers ? We should like to hear of their ever being caught treating a " labour " document from the Trades Council in this fashion. They richly deserved the snub they got from the House over their attempt.

A "Reading j%n& Recitation.'

The Minister for Lands, it seems, has been detected in the high Parliamentary crime — not recogn isable as such by common stay -at - home people —of reading his speeches, or one of them. If we remember right the same thing occurred last year, when the same hon. gentleman came to somewhat ludicrous grief through "boggling," as the dominies call it, over some peculiarly abstruse "explanation" furnished him to order by a departmental clerk. The hon. gentlemau did not in the least understand his own " explanation " before ,he made it, the House did not understand it while he was making ir, and nobody in or out of the House understood it after it was made. All of which, though it may have annoyed the hon. member's friends, surprised neither them nor bis enemies, if he has any. On the present occasion the experience of last year seems to have been wisely borne in mind by the Minister, with the result that he concluded — no doubt with considerable accuracy — that the mistake on the former occasion consisted in not having written it out completely enough. Accordingly he had it written out for him this time with an amplitude that left nothing to be desired, and was proceeding to get it all comfortably into Hansard — possibly with the view of looking it up there afterwards and endeavouring honestly to make out what it meant — when an unfeeling Opposition member intervened with objections to " the hon. member reading his speech." "Never mind who wrote it" retorted Mr M'Kenzie, and proceeded to wresile with the matter supplied him, after the manner of a bora Southron attempting the recitation of one of Barns' poems to an

audience of Scotch agriculturist*. Repeated objections to this process elicited from the Minister (who seems by that time to have forgotten his former remark above quoted) a denial that he was reading it ; from Mr Seddou, the somewhat inconsistent addition that somebody e'.S6 had once done the same thing- which was an odd comment on Mr M'Kenzie's denial: from Mr Ballance, a suggestion that the speaker had what he called " full notes " — an expression the ingenuity of which secures our highest commendation ; from Mr Reeves, a reminiscence that Sir Julius Vogel had "also" read a speech " some years ago " — really, the unfortunate Minister for Lands has most inconvenient colleagues ; and finally, from the tormented speaker (or rather reader) himself, a practical admission that aEter all he ivas reading — which one would think he might as well have said first as last.

For our part, we don't see why a gentleman should not be allowed to read his speech, if he finds it necessary to call in the aid of*others to concoct it for him. Mr M'Kenzie, or anyone else, might be a very good Minister for Lands without having a good memory for speeches ; besides which the supplier's handwriting may be bad, or his grammer open to suspicion — which we imagine is the case in former experiences of Mr M'Kenzie's in the matter of speeches which he has had from time to time to deal with in a similar manner. We hope the allusion is not too delicate for his comprehension; if so a reference to the Haniard report of his Clutha namesake's speech will tend to its elucidation.

A Millionaire.

New Zealand no longer needs what prohibition orators call " shocking examples " to teach her the evils of national recklessness in the matter of public loans. IE she did, the spectacle presented by the two Jeading colonies across the water would adequately supply the requirement. Month after month the record goes on, alternating in its centre of interest between Sydney and Melbourne, but otherwise maintaining' an unfailing standard of shockingness sufficient for the trade requirements of itinerant leclurersforthe next decade or more. Positively there would be a sense of something gone a-missiDg if a daily paper were' taken up nowadays without the customary items from over the Tasmaa Sea about "a bank failure, or a meeting of furious shareholders, cr a " Pacific slope," or the arreßt of a member of Parliament, or a writ against an t'xalted official, or an avowal of -a huge deficit in the public finauces

This latter item is the 6ubject of the late* t cablegraphic announcement, and it is sufficiently startling. The Victorian Treasurer, by a singular chance, has almost 'exactly achieved what is supposed nowadays to be the chief end of manhood-namely , millionairehood. He announced a difference between his receipts and expenditure of Ll,000,560 ; but, ft is unfortunately necessary to explain that it is the latter Bide of his books which showed r,he above excess over the other at the end of the year. As Mr Shiels began his financial year with a good healthy deficit of L 900.000 and has managed to add to it at the rate, of about LSOOO^ a day right through the twelvemonths* — not even excluding Sundays — he finds himself entitled on June 30 to place L 1,900,000 to the debit of his colony, but, it may be added, hardly to the credit of himself. Even if we charitably assume that tbe Treasurer has in this avowal confessed the whole truth — which, however, is not the way of Treasurers, for confirmation of which vide current reports of our own financial de-< bate — the most boomingly inclined of us must admit that the last state of Victoria is such as to make out the first to have been by no means worth while. It is a pity Sir Matthew Davies scampered off from London just before the Budget speech was cabled Home. It would have ensured him a warmer send-off than he got — which is saying a gooi deal.

The Otnso Central.

The meeting' of the Central Railway League on Tuesday was a pronoanced success. The utmost unanimity prevailed amongst those present, and the determination to carry on the present agitation to the utmost constitutional limits was very marked. As was pointed out by Mr Barron and Mr Pyke, there is no necessity for resorting to a loan if only justice is done to us. For what i 3 it that is asked for ? Only the refunding of a small part of our own money, raised from the use of our own lands. Had the conditions of the Act authorising the abolition of the provinces been adhered to, the people of Otago would not have needed to go begging to Parliament. For by that Act the whole of the land fund was secured to the provinces. It has been frittered away bit by bit — a clause repealed now, and another again, until the last shred is threatened to be taken away. But Otago is still in a position to demand — indeed to insist — that something like justice shall be done ; and if her people only continue to exhibit such unanimity as at present prevails on thß subject of the Otago Central railway, they must and will prevail.

It is well that the position should be properly understood. Last session the stuu of L 30,000 was appropriated for the line, out. of which L 15.000 was to be expended in the financial j ear 1891-92. There is, therefore, still to the credit of the line a sum of L 15.000, and to now offer an appropriation of L 30.000 is but placing an additional LIo.OOO to our credit. Now this sum will only carry the line to Hyde, if it even does as much. And to stop at Hyde will scarcely add one iota to the beneficial uses of the line. This was explained on Tuesday by Mr Pyke. Between Hyde and the Maniototo Plain there are two obstacles to progress which no carrier will care to undertake. There is a difficult hill at the Capburn, and a river — tha Taieri— often swollen, and unfordable at the foot. These must be surmounted before the line will be of use to the dwellers in the interior, and, therefore, to stop at Hyde is to stay out in the cold for another series of years. Surely Mr Scobie Mackenzie must be aware of this. Why, thtrefure, did he advocate stopping at Hyde as a compromise instead of insisting on Eweburn as the nearest point where the line would tap the Maniototo Plain 1 The truth appears to be that our members have not grasped the fact embodied in the first resolution of the league — that nothing short of permanent provision

for the progress of the line will be satisfactory to the people of Otago. Bat they may rely upon it that such is a solid fact, and that any merely temporary provision will not be acceptable.