IT WILL NEVER END

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

IT WILL NEVER END

AUSTRALIA’S WAR BILL. Australia has been reckoning up, and it seems that a quarter of a million Australians are still receiving war pensions from the Commonwealth. When the war began twenty years ago Australia called for her youngest and bravest, sent them to Enbland, and put her hands in her pockets to pay their expenses. The bill is still coming in. Many of the Australian Expeditionary Force never saw the dear dun plains their homeland again. Many more returned to them maimed. Since the war £140,000,000 has been paid in pensions and gratuities. Settle - ment of the survivors on the land, war service homes, and training schemes have helped to mount the bill to £200,000,000 since the war ended. That is what it has cost just one unit of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Mother Country can sympathise, but can do no more. With her, as with her younger sons, the payment never ends. It never will, in our lifetime. BRAVE LITTLE BELGIUM Belgium, which is producing so many heroes nowadays, has now a population of 8,248,000. The increase recorded is small, about 30,000 a year. Even this is illusory, for the number of births, as in our own case, is not large enough to maintain the existing population.