The Southland Times. PUBLISHED DAILY. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, 25th AUGUST, 1885.

Southland Times, Issue 8095, 25 August 1885, Page 2

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED DAILY. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, 25th AUGUST, 1885.

The New Zealand Civil Servants do not all live in clover. A paragraph which we published on Saturday last stated that the telegraphists were s o poorly .paid that many of them had to file their schedules through mere stress of weather. If this is the case, and there seems to be little doubt about it, the Government are deeply to blame, We do not mean the present Ministry in particular, for they are no worse than their predecessors, but the successive occupants of the Ministerial benches •— » the continuous Government of the colony. Our Civil Service in fact resembles the Church of England in this respect if in no other, that a few of its members are paid handsomely for doing very little, and a great many of them very poorly for doiDg a great deal. This is not exactly as it ought to be. "Very costly as the Civil Service as a whole is, it is disgraceful that any class of public seivants should hare to work for starvation wages. The rank and file of those belonging to the Post Iffice and Telegraph Department have been always more or less in that predicament 5 and the Government know it perfectly well. About two years ago, when certain objections were being made to some of the Estimates, Mr Dick, who was then Postmaster-General as well as Colonial Secretary, stated in the House that the officers of his department were both very much overworked and wretchedly underpaid. This was, indeed, a strange statement for a Minister to make, What is the use of Ministers, we might ask, if they do not look after their departments ? The colony certainly does not wish any gf its hard-working servants to be so very scunily remunerated But Mr Dick was content, after making that candid confession, to go on drawing his £1250 a year, and allow the poor drudges under his immediate care and control to star re, A Minister with any sort of spirit, one imagines, would rather have thrown up his portfolio than occupy such an equivocal positioii. But we suppose Ministers soon acquire as much of the niggerdriving temper as serves to prevent their conscience from reproaching them with the difference between their own full tables and the slender fare of their luckless subordinates. There is something, for example, grimly incongruous between the reports going at the present time about expenditure on Ministerial residences, particularly on that of the PostmasterGeneral, and the alleged unavoidable pecuniary embarrassment of a large number of telegraphists. The Government, it seems, have asked these embarrassed servants to send in a statement of their affairs, with the view, we presume, of granting them some relief. But justice and not charity is what is wanted in this case ; it would be monstrous for the fetate to pauperise any of its servants, and especially such a useful and intelligent class as the telegraphists ; and we hope the Postmaster-General, who is certainly not a stingy gentleman, will at once take steps to efface this blot from the administration of our affairs, and free the colony from a serious scandal. There are, we beg to say, three or four members of the Government who are most unquestionably not worth half their salary^ -we mention no names, buj^the public know quite well who they are, as do also Mr Stout and Sir Julius Yogel. pur jjropesal then is that: these three or four gentlemen who have been proyidentially, mid, »s it worp, ?nii»fio]poply,

raised to the dignity of; what they themselves would no doubt call " Ministers of the Crown." should have their " screw" cut down by one lhalf (i.e. to £625 each, which is still considerably more than they deserve, but /we don't wish to be shabby), and that the balance, which would amount to, a tidy- little sum, should go, 't0,., square the humble pass-books of the embarrassed telegraphists. This would at once be a - slight relief to the consolidated revenue and tend to equalise the Salaries of . our Civil Servants of the humbler sort, amongst whom the gentlemen we have referred to may, with all due respect and deference, be included. And what, by the way, about that other scandal which waß brought before the notice of the House by Mr Joyce soon after Parliament met? Has it been removed ? Or do the Government printers still work in a poisonous atmosphere —to the delight of the Typhoid fiend anof for the glory of Laissez-faire 1 The condition of the printing offices as described in. the graphic words of the member for Awarua, .forms a striking contrast to what we read in •' own correspoi dence r and elsewhere of the luxury and glory of Bellamy's, which, we understand, is partly paid for out of the public purse. Wellington would seem to be, like London, a place of glaring contrasts; and we do not mean, in particular, the contrast between the "collective wisdom" as exhibited in our legislative Olympians and the comnsonplace every day character of what may be denominated the subject population.