NOT A SOCIALIST.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13847, 8 March 1909, Page 6

NOT A SOCIALIST.

A PLAY ON BOARDS

"I am not a Socialist," Lord Rdsebery told an interested House of Lords the other day. He enlarged amusingly on another aspect of the subject in the course of a speech at Edinburgh on agriculture. They were at'last, lie said, advancing to a pa-nacea from which every good thing might be hoped. Think what a paradise Scotland would be if it were inhabited by a population of crofters governed by a central board. After - all perhaps it was not the crofters part of it. which was the best; it was the inevitable board which appeared in every Bill which was the backbone of every legislative proposal. It was that with which he confessed he was chiefly enamoured. A Bill without a board, and a well paid board, would be an anomaly, such as the House of Commons would not consider for a minute. He himself had "taken into serious consideration the question of putting under a hoard, which would consist of two members at one thousand a year and a chairman with two thousand. There would be a spiritual member of the board; and a medical member of the board, and a chairman, who would undertake all the rest of his mental and material affairs. (Laughter.) Underneath these three gentlemen —so far as his means would extend—there would be a secretary and a series of inspectors, who would follow every step of his daily life, and who would receive an income as far as his estate could furnish it. That was the ideal lie hnd formed for his declining years. (Loud laughter.) • He pictured a serious knot proceedt. ing along the Queensferry-road, near Dalmeny, at a. measured pace a year or two hence. That would be himself surrounded by his board, accompanied by an inspector of physical exercise and j>receded by an inspector of nuisanecs, with his medical member on his right, liis spiritual member on his left, and his chairman in close attendance. (Ln lighter.) He did not despair if legislation went on along its present lines of seeing three-fourths of the nation as a board of inspectors over the other fourth. ,