LESSON OF THRIFT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 12, 15 January 1932, Page 5

LESSON OF THRIFT

NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN UNIVERSITY’S EXAMPLE. DUNEDIN, Jan. 13. “These recurring periods of depression must be kept steadily in view. We must never forget that in the prosperous times that precede and follow them we must not spend all our revenue, but lay past against the evil day. Thrift, the maker of man, must never be abandoned in any period of prosperity for those pernicious substitutes inflation and unproductive borrowing, substitutes that all governments, but especially Labour governments and colonial governments, have a strong tendency towards as the easiest way out of financial straits,” said Professor J. Macmillan Brown, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, in his address to-day to the Senate. “The lesson that labour is getting dramatically taught in the Homeland,” he went on to say, “is forgotten as soon as the cloud of depression lifts. This quick oblivion of the necessity of foreseeing economy docs not follow immediately after the war that has destroyed the capital and has caused the depression. There is a pause before the younger generation that has known neither the difficult climb out of the depths to prosperity, nor the destructive wastage of war, comes into power and the direction of affairs and once they fall heir to tl. powers of the preceding generation they think that the universal talisman and panacea which they have seen rescuing their own and other countries out of the depths—borrowing—is as applicable to peace and recuperation as to the ravages of war. The bulk of them arc still at the stage of life which is governed solely by the pursuit of pleasure, and they take their fill of it as they see their older comraders do who have returned from the war. The lesson the war should have taught them they have not learned, and there is needed after the pause a long period of bitter depression with its attendant evils of unemployment and distress to teach them. But by the time the next generation comes to the guidance of affairs, not only is this new tuition in thrift forgotten, but the horror of war and the disgust it engenders are swept out and nothing less than a new war with its sequent depression is needed to inculcate the necessity of foresight and economy. “The first half-century of our University was lucky in having as its treasurers men who realised this and laid up against the evil day that was sure to come. Professor Shand, who fulfilled the duties of the office during most of the time, was Professor of Mathematics in a Scotch community, and an Aberdeen Scot. He kept his balance from fees and subsidy liquid, and the result was as I pointed out last year, when we reached the great depression that was bound to follow the Great War, and the Government was in such a fix financially that it had to look into every corner, especially into that of subsidies, to collect enough to balance its unbalanced Budget. It thought not only about cutting down or abolishing our subsidy, but still more critically enviously it looked at that liquid balance of £70,000, which Professor Shand and his successors had squeezed out of the fees and the subsidy, to be a scholarship fund in times of need. It saw at last that if it took away that balance it would have to replace >t in the shape of scholarships. That lesson of thrift which helped us through several periods of depression I hope we shall not forget, even though we have no longer that capable and forethinking Aberdonian to impress it upon us as he watches over our treasury.”