The Waipawa Mail. Published Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Saturday, April 28, 1906. NOTES.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXVI, Issue 4954, 28 April 1906, Page 2

The Waipawa Mail. Published Tues days, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Saturday, April 28, 1906. NOTES.

The Taranaki Herald , in advocating local government reform, says “ in the Taranaki county thero are no fewer than sixteen Road Boards, one of them having jurisdiction over sixteen ratepayers, and another having a rate revenue in 1904-5 of £2l. About eighty members of these Boards, with, we suppose, sixteen clerks, some paid and others, perhaps, doing the work gratuitously, are looking after the roads under their control. It is not in connection with roads only that the local Government system is so absurd. Hospital and charitable aid management, the administration of the Education Acts, control of harbours, and other branches of local government want overhauling. There is a Harbour Board—the Waimakariri—in the South Island which has a revenue of £lO to be idministered by five men, and cargo t< the amount of 270 tons a year to deal with. . . .

Something between the old Provincial Government system and the present cumbersome system of over-lapping of authorities is required, but one thing is certain that memoers of Parliament are not competent to devise a good workable measure, nor yet is the Crown law draughtsman. A small commission of experts, with practical and legal knowledge, could, however, be found capable of doing it, and until some such course is taken we despair of having sensible local government laws.”

The Mercantile Gazette says the Valuation Department apparently has a generous appreciation of the saying that “ one fool makes many,” for land valuations are based not upon any sober and scientific methods, but are arrived at by taking recent sales as the bases. Thus, if one individual gives a fancy or wholly fictitious price for a piece of land, all the contiguous property suffers, because the valuations are based on the recorded scale. Thus, whenever land values show great expansion, it may be safely assumed that the Government is profiting by a land boom. The Department’s valuations are, of course, rightly accepted for statistical treatment, hence the private wealth of the colony is shown to be very large. It is a fiction that cannot be maintained much longer, and the free writing down of land values must be taken in hand very soon. The Valuation Department is said to have assessed values strictly in accordance with law, which may be true enough, but in the opinion of out contemporary so far as this department is concerned “ the law is a hass.”

In pursuance of his annual practice, the Rev. Edward Walker has prepared some interesting statistics concerning New Zealand’s drink bill for 1906. The total expenditure foe the year was

.1 . -0..6 , a a., .v . ,i 2, i t' ■ ~t\ .io.ia year, being it unction G £ d. ’ itwithstanding m officiary fc timaLii increase of 23, -34 in V e population. This represents a diminish.'! consumption per head of 2s Bd, th: (.."it substantial variation by way of reduction since 1394 ; the effect of the vigorous temperance propaganda throughout the intervening years of comm rcial prosperity having shown itself in pr: venting the enormous expaus'o i of the anni at drink bill whioh Mr Walk: r holds would otherwise have resulted. During the previous 10 years of commercial depression the drink bill per head fell annually with slight variations from L 3 16s in 1885 to £8 Is Id in 1894. By 1904 it had risen again to £3 Is 10Jd, and last year was £3 8s 2Jd, or £l7 0s lljd per household, taking five persons as the household average. Whether or not the whole of this 2s 3d reduction last year was due to temperance effort, including a restraint upon the trade of a wholesome fear in view of the local option polls, Mr Walker is not prepared to affirm; but, apart from extraordinary effort in that direction, he regards the drink bill as indicating the degree of public prosperity or depression with the accuracy of a barometer. This means not that more or fewer people drink, but that the harder drinkers consume more or less in proportion to the money at their disposal, which also means that the bulk of the consumption is shamefully wasteful and mischievous. He inclines to the view that this time the reduction must be credited almost entirely, if not wholly, to the temperance reform movement.

Review) M" Ki.kmau Gray’s History o' E Philanthropy the Lancet say ‘: 1.0 Id be scarcely possible to n- ■ a form of charity, either actual oi projected, among ourselves, of which at least the nucleus may not be discovered in the past, or as to which some information of value will not reward the patient enquirer into history. From the commencement to the close of Mr Gray's enquiries, “want of employment” appears as the most constant explanation of the poverty which has required the help of the charitable; and the causes of the want do not vary much among successive generations. . . .

The unemployed poor are roughly divisible into two great bodies, for which totally different treatment is required. There the helpless victims of a diminution in the demand for the only industry which they have learned to practise, and there are the systematic idlers whom n body will employ except in times of pressure. The great object of the former class is, or should be, to remain where the are known and where their characters will help them; the great object of the latter is to seek alms where they are unknown and where their record will not tend to their disadvantage. . . . As for the wastrels, the men who want wages without work, the only plan of dealing with them is the penal labour colony. Compulsory work for those who will not work voluntarily, together with separation l of the sexes, ini get afford a possible solution of the problem presented by the unemployable, but the difficulties in organising such a scheme would be very great in this country, and could only be overcome if a strong social party were convinced of its practical and moral merits.