The Otago Witness, THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2784, 24 July 1907, Page 52

The Otago Witness,

THE WEEK.

* WITH WHICH IS IKCQRPOBATEB THE SOUTHERN xmncuaT.

[WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 1907)

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.The Government has endeavoured to atone for its dilatoriness in A W«* «f the dispatch of business by SarprUe*. springing upon Parliament during the past week a series of surprises. Possibly the Prime Minister was stimulated by the thought that in bringing down the proposal which changes N«w Zealand from colony to dominion he had failed to snrrotmdi the sentiment with tha£ amount of dramatic force which the occasion demanded. Perhaps he wm» haunted by tKe •hade of bis famous predecessor hovering around the

scene of his former triumphs. In any case, it is impossible to avoid imagining the zest and enthusiasm with which the late Mr Seddon would have invested so !*-3ly Imperial an idea. However, Sir Joseph Ward in his Budget proposals has succeeded in providing a considerable surprise — for his own supporters — in what ha 6 been correctly described as " a bad backdown" upon the land policy. And there are at least three members of the Cabinet who, since the return of their chief from the Imperial Conference, have been having a bad quarter of an hour. Poor Mr M'Nab is on every hand being reminded of that much-quoted passage in his fan.ous speech of last session when he said: "We are going to stand by our guns, and will, if necessary, stand by them, go dowa with them, and in a twinkling of an eye. W« are not going to float about the Treasury benches whilst the people are not able to make ont what our land policy is." The Minister of Lands, who is a University graduate, is probably a student of Bacon, and in the course of his reading he may have happened across the great essayist's dissertation pa. " Discourse," wherein he remarks, "Discretion of speech is more than eloquence." There remadn& little doubt that when Mr M'Nab delivered his now historic oration he was carried away by the exuberance of his own verbosity, and that bis utterance was not founded npon solid conviction. Thus it comes about that to-day, to again quote Bacon, he has " need to be afraid of others' memory." For how does the case stand in the light of the Prime Minister's Budget speech and the Land Bill as presented to Parliament. So far from "standing- by his guns," Mr M'Nab has, by retaining his seat in the Cabinet, virtually surrendered the leasehold principle for which he has so strenuously striven all through the recess. And the people are no longer "unable to make out what Mr M'Nab's land policy is." The land policy of the Minister of Lands is what, despite his Socialistic sophistries, it always has been : it Is the policy of the Farmers' Union and of the Opposition — a policy which allows the landholder to exercise 'the option of the freehold.

A month since, commenting upon the issues which faced members A Triamph ftr upon the reassembling of tk« Laarihelder. Parliament, we ventured

the contention that instead of Mr M'Nab succeeding in his selfimposed mission of converting the country to the principle of the leasehold, the country had succeeded! in converting Mr M'Nab to the principle of the freehold : "and the events of the past week go far to prove the correctness of onr contention. For, despite the elaborate and laboured attempts of the Minister of Lands to explain to newspaper interviewers that he didn't mean what Jie said last year, and that his fifth version of the Land Bill is not a contradiction, of the original version, the fact remains that Mr M'Nab has forfeited the confidence of both friend and foe- in bis evident determination tc " still float about the Treasury benches." As has been cogently pointed) out by a northern contemporary, the correct course for Mr M'Nab, in company with Mr Millar and Mr IFowlds, would have been to place their resignations in the hands of their colleagues immediately after the Cabinet council when the Budget proposals were decided upon. By so doing, this' little group of Single-taxers and leaseholders by profession - would, at any rate, have earned the respect of Parliament and of the country in following out a consistent path in the political sphere. But instead we have the humiliating spectacle of a Minister of the Crown feebly attempting to justify or explain away an evident climb-down from a well-defined position taken up voluntarily in connection with the most important party question of the diay. And in so doing the Minister of Lands has unquestionably lowered himself to the level of the character 60 cleverly caricatured by W. S. Gilbert in "Pinafore " : the man who " always voted at his party's call and never thought of thinking for himself at all." Then there | is the Minister of Labour, who, after committing himself to Socialistic proposals involving the establishment of a State flourmill and the abolition of the duty on wheat and flour, finds all his ideas flouted in the Government's tariff proposals. And! Mr Millar is finding himself hard pressed, for when confronted by a deputation from his former coadjutors of the Trades and Labour Council, demanding preference to unionists, he had noI thing to say either one way or the | other. As for Mr Fowlds, he has discreetly kept silence, preferring temporary obscurity to .the glaring light of publicity. For, however the present position may be explained away, it remains that the Prime Minister's Budget proposals are a triumph for the landowners and the agriculturist, as against the small yet noisy section of Socialists and the extreme Labour party, who desire to see the country committed to all kinds of mad experiments in a misguided endeavour to improve the position of the worker. For at laet the real strength of the country stands revealed, not in the city, but in the country ; and Sir Joseph Ward is to be congratulated upon having appreciated the signs of the times and upon having backbone enough to disregard the clamour of the few in an honest endeavour to minister to thf> pro c pcntv -of the communitj as a, whole.

The long-prom : 6ed re\ision of the tariff is at length at hand an<i A Ym-Xo the proposals of the GovernTariff. ment are before the country.

And a most curious conglomeration of the tpposing doctrines of Freetrade and Protection the document is, 345 might be expected from a Minister who has not studied the first principles of political economy. Mr Millar unwit-

tingly let the cat out of the bag when, in reply to a deputation from tlie Trades and Labour Council, he explained the principle upon which the proposed alterations had been scheduled. "When there were 700 or 800 things to deal with, and where one" man's raw material became another man's manufacture, it was very difficult to know what to dra. Every man wanted what he imported to come in free, and to have the highest possible duty placed upon what he manufactured himself." Exactly ; and when a tariff is revised' in a vain attempt ■to please or placate everybody, a glorious confusion is the result ; hence the proposed " Yes-No Tariff," which is full of anomaly and which, although providing for a remission of duty of something like £375,000, will in the long run benefit the consumer but little, for what is taken off with one hand is put on with the other. Apparently three main ideas have been kept in mind in the production of this curious fiscal blend: first, the free breakfast table; second, the protection of colonial manufactures ; and thirdly, preference in favour of the imports from British possessions. \nd even the third proposition is obscured by the fact that the British Empire is piebald, and consequently Protection is proposed against such lines as Burmese candles and tea- packed in India or Ceylon, where the native labour question comes into operation. The free breakfast table is a beautiful . sentiment, but it hardly works out in practice. Carried to its logical conclusion, it would involve the remission of the duty on wheat, flour and other grains, for bread and oatmeal form the most substantial part of the average man'B breakfast. But the Prime Minister very properly put his foot down very firmly againstany proposal entailing the extinction of the New- Zealand flourmilling industry, with its corollary the cessation of wheat-growing by the farmer. Thus, at one fell swoop, disappeared the Socialistic notion of cheaper bread and oatmeal. As a- sop to the free breakfast table idea, the duty has been taken off sugar, and although the gross remission &eems a substantial one, the bulk of the duty frill, it precedent counts for anything, go into the pockets of the manufacturers of jams and biscuits and lollies, without the public reaping any commensurate advantage. This wa6 the case when, rhe duty was remitted on tea, and 1 history has a habit of repeating itself. The .other duties remitted in the interests of a free breakfast table — for example, on mustard, pepper, coffee, and dried fruits — are in themselves so small as scarcely to be appreciated. On the other hand, a heavier impost has been placed upon boots and candles — two most necessary articles involving considerable outlay ; — while the new preferential duties include quite a number of other articles in common use .or everyday consumption. And this unsatisfactory state of things is the inevitable result of endeavouring to make a- compromise between, two' axiomatically antagonistic principles. We can well understand this "Yes-No Tariff" from the standpoint of the Minister of Labour; but, bearing in mind the Prime Minister's expressions at the Imperial Conference, it would have been a consistent course t> take up had Sir Joseph Ward, essayed the experiment of Freetrade with the British Empire and substantial Protection against all foreign countries. And this is apparently the only satisfactory solution of the existing anomalies in the New Zealand fiscal question.

It is impossible to avoid the reflection that much time would have The Debaie on been saved, and the busiTk« Budget. ness of the country con-

siderably expedited, could the Budget proposals, the tariff revisions, and the Land Bills have been circulated immediately upon the opening of Parliament. As a matter of fact, Parliament lias now been sitting for four weeks, and the real business only commenced last night with the start of the debate on the Budget proposals. The cutting-out of that useless anomaly the Governor's Speech, despite the hoary traditions which linger around an ancient custom, causing many people to regard it as one of the bulwarks of the British Constitution, would render impossible the annual rehearsal of that string of weary platitudes dignified by the title of the'debate on the AdJress-in-Reply. For exactly the same men who have already occupied page after page of Hansard in saying absolutely nothing (or, to be more precise and employ a phrase which Hazlitt attributed to Sheridan when referring to a speech in Parliament, that " contained a great deal of both of what was new and true, but unfoitunately what was new was not true and what was true was not new ") — the^e are the men who will again unloose the flood-gates of talk when the Budget debate gets fairly under way. Byron, in perhaps the most often quoted stanza in '• Beppo/' exclaims : "England! with all tby faults I love thee still" I said at Calais, ana have not forgot it; I like to speak and lucubrate my nil ; I like ths government (but that is not ii); I like the freedom of the press ond quill ; I like the Habeas Corpus- (wh-en we've got it) ; I like a Parliamentary debate. Particularly when 'tis not too late. And considering all the surrounding circumstances, probably the average elector is looking forward to the Budget debate with more than, the ordinary degree of interest. With Byron, in the interest of the health of the members of the Lower House, we may express the hope that the liking for the Budget debate may not be .spoiled by the discussion being prolonged into too many days, or into the small hours of the morning. There is a. fa-c-onrite quotation from the Latin of Salluat which, being interpreted., reads : " Plenty of talk but little wisdom." And as a maxim to bo borne in mind by every member desirous of peeing in Hansard, we will coni elude by quoting Ovid when he cay*: —

" Slight is -the merit of keeping silent ou a matter ; on the other hand, serious is the guilt- of talking on things whereon we should be ignorant."