South Canterbury Times. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 1889.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 5025, 5 June 1889, Page 2

South Canterbury Times. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 1889.

That there is a good deal of common sense, and a good deal of the sense of fair play, in the remarks of the Chairman of the Port Chalmers Licensing Bench, reported in a telegram to-day, can hardly be denied by the stoutest enemy of the drink traffic. It manifestly is an injustice that individual licensees should be subjected to attacks upon their livelihood, when the whole of them collectively are given a statutory right to exist. The law is anomalous which, while protecting the majority, permits a minority to be “ compelled annually to light as for their bare lives/’ It will not do, it is unfair, to argue as some do, that a licensee has no claim to a renewal of an’expiring license. The expensive conditions imposed upon licensees must give them a right to it, in common honesty. The licensing benches have from the first demanded that the licensee (except in the larger towns perhaps, and there in the great majority of cases) shall he an innkeeper, and have generally stipulated that he shall keep a very good inn too. They demand to sec the plans of proposed hotel buildings ; they command a licensee to pull down an old and erect a new building; they insist upon repairs being effected here, improvements of some kind being made there. If obedience to these commands does not give a person a right to a continuance of the privilege for the sake of which they are complied with (other necessary conditions being also fulfilled), wo cannot see [what could give him such a right, apart from®an arbitrary law. If

the drink traffic is to be attacked, let ‘t be under a declaration of war against the whole business, not by a system of local murders and manslaughters; in the Legislative Assembly, not in the village caucus.

The Midland Railway Company, according to a pai’agraph we publish this evening, is raising £745,000 in London for railway construction and equipment, by five per cent debentures, priced at £92 10s per £IOO. This price makes the interest paid on the money borrowed,a little over 5 2-sths percent. Whether we admit it or not, whether we like it or net, this loan raised by the Midland Company is an addition to our debt as a nation, though technically not an addition to our national debt. If the interest is paid, New Zealand must somehow or other find the money. The principal difference between this debtand a Government debt is, that wo should not;be nationally disgraced if the interest were not paid in any year or years. If the company pays its money lenders, well and good ; they must render some services to the colony to get the money to pay the bondholders; but if the railway will pay tbe company, wby would it not have paid the colony to construct it ? The “ borrowing policy ” has been pole-axed by the Legislature ; but it was only stunned, and is restored through the medium of a railway syndicate.