The Christchurch Star. PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. SATURDAY, ARIL 7, 1934. WINTER RELIEF.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20274, 7 April 1934, Page 12

The Christchurch Star. PUBLISHED BY New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. SATURDAY, ARIL 7, 1934. WINTER RELIEF.

T TNEMPLOYMENT is so far from tlie normal that it is impossible, in the depression, to sustain a normal spirit of independence among those who have been hardest hit by the times. It is desirable, however, to meet this large section of the community half way, or as near it as possible, in the processes by which, above all, the daily bread is provided. / For that reason very careful consideration must be given to the proposal that winter relief rations should be sold at a proportion of their cost, and not given away except in cases of abject poverty. At first blush the idea, or some modification of it, must make a strong appeal to the imagination. Mr Ramsay MacDonald, who by the magic of the talkie has been able, in Christchurch, to repeat a lieartening New Year message that he spoke into a London microphone, dwelt on the fact that 600,000 families had been able to provide from their own resources, however slender, a Christmas dinner that twelve months before had come to them only through private or public beneficence. That feeling of self-reliance, of course, was the result of increasing employment, but however it is generated it is to be welcomed. For all that, there are grave objections to the proposal that has been put forward in Christchurch even apart from its estimate of a much higher purchasing power than the relief workers possess. It would involve, primarily, a centralised and congested struggle for rations in which selfrespect would take wings among those who most needed its support, and it would eliminate the personal contacts that have brought a valuable humanising understanding into the administration of this necessary work. JAPANESE “BABIES.” TT IS QUITE LIKELY that Japan is planning, as a London cablegram suggests, to flood the British home and overseas market with £SO baby motor-cars, for already Japanese bicycle dumping has been noted in the East, and Japanese bicycles to-day are delivered in foreign ports at the approximate British factory cost. An amusing incident is reported from British Malaya, where, a leading pawnbroker had a run on bicycles on which he lent five dollars. He valued them at twenty dollars at the lowest, but later found that they were Japanese, selling at 3* dollars retail, so that those who pledged them made a dollar and a half on each machine. At the present rate of exchange Japanese male workers are receiving just a sixth or seventh of the British worker’s wage, and are working ten hours a day. In fact, the combination of Japanese low wages, depreciated currency, inferior working conditions, Government subsidies and shipping rebates is a tremendous problem which Britain cannot regard with equanimity. A MINORITY PROTEST. Western Australia enT T tared the Federation of Australian States in 1900 she was uneasy lest her policies should be over-ridden by the larger States ofVictoria and New South Wales, and that fear has never been allayed. The attempt to escape from the Federation is another evidence of the desire for self-determination by a minority partner. The feeling has found some expression in the South Island of New Zealand in a hankering for the return of the old Provincial Council days. It is at the bottom of the Home Rule for Scotland movement, and underlies Ireland’s troubles. And the history of British colonisation and American independence is full of examples of just such secessionist agitation engendered by contempt for the interests of minorities. We commend this fact to the notice of those who are preparing to abandon proportional representation as an electoral pacifier of minorities.