DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17787, 12 August 1929, Page 6

DAY BY DAY.

A writer in a country newspaper maintains that it is th.c duty Government of the Government to and find jobs for the jobEmployment. less. Sucli a view seems to be widely held, remarks an Australian journal, and'to-day we have people .who are being taught to look to the Government for direct aid from the very cradle to the grave. We begin with a Government payment to meet the new citizen’s natal expenses; we continue with an endowunent payment, free education, free medical attention, compensation when ill or injured, free rations when idle, old age pension, and, at a pinch, free burial. What more natural than that increasing numbers of our people should lean upon the Government for everything and demand, not request, that jobs be found for them when they want them? Even now one can hear people say,, “The Government must find me a job or keep me.” Are people of that type fitted to hold and rule a continent? Most decidedly they are not. The function of a Government is to govern; and that means that it will take all steps necessary to permit its people .to earn their own living. It should encourage citizens to regard as their own responsibility fitting and training themselves for jobs which they must make for themselves. A country cannot become great if the mass of people are content to be day labourers working for the Government, nor can a country go on indefinitely borrowing millions for public works. The Government ought to help men to help themselves, by finding markets and means of transport whereby they can obtain, by producing wealth, that standard of comfort to which their intelligently directed industry entitles them. That is the was to raise a self-reliant community, but a spoon-fed community is scarcely worth raising.