ISLE OF MAN.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18844, 6 April 1931, Page 3

ISLE OF MAN.

“ NO NEED FOR OTTO NIEMEYER.” The Isle of Man receives the following compliments in an article published in the “Register News-Pictorial,” a journal circulating in Southern Australia: — Where do good taxpayers go when they die? Perhaps to the Isle of Man, which has no unemployment, no crime, and —no national debt. It is the only country in Europe which can budget for a surplus. The Isle of Man has been wistfully described by tourists as the country where people emerge from the income tax office wearing a happy smile. There is excellent reason for it. The gross income of the island last year was £401,274, and there was a gross surplus of £39,300 on Customs, and a surplus of £10,766 on income tax. If it had not been for its public spirit the Isle of Man would probably have no income tax at all. The Manx Government generously offered to shoulder £750,000 worth of war debt, which it pays at the rate of £50,000 a year to the British Treasury. That is a wholly voluntary burden. There is no unemployment, because the Government at a pinch can always spare a thousand or two for a developmental scheme to absorb lauour. The one prison on the island, which employs eight people, houses three prisoners, and the last murderer known there was executed by Manx law eighty years ago. The Isle of Man has never needed a Sir Otto Niemeyer to put its finances straight. The extent of its people’s instinct for sound finance is to be seen In the column erected in Castletown to the memory of Colonel Cornelius Smelt, the first Lieutenant Governor, who died in 1832. There is no effigy of the Government standing on this column, as was first inteaded, because the inhabitants built it by subscription, and started to construct it as soon as the money came in. The funds ran out, so they economised by leaving out the colonel. In other respects the Isle of Man Is less rational and more romantic. There is a hill on it called Tynwald, made of earth taken in distant ages from the seventeen parishes in the Island, and no Manx law that has received the King’s assent is valid until it has been read out to the people from this hill. The custom goes back to the time of the Viking who was buried, with his horse and his bowl of blood, in another spot in the island. A large number of tourists are attracted every year to this island of the blessed, and nearly every one of them endeavours to take home a Manx cat as a mascot, but the animals offered to them, though of respectable Manx descent, have all plain, prosaic tails. The true Manx cat or “runpie” is prized., and hardly to be bought for love or money.