A HAZY VIEW.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVIII, Issue 25, 15 October 1886, Page 15

A HAZY VIEW.

IE latest deliverance on Protection, the subject that is now occupying so great a share of public attention — more especially in connection with the Central election in Dunedin — is that reported to have been made by the Hon. Mr. Ballance, speaking the other night at Masterton. Mr. Ballance, if reported aright, reduces the question to a very simple matter, and one that should enable even the merest tyro to form a just conclusion without much difficulty. The question, he says, lies entirely between the manufacturers and importers, and it is for them to decide it. The chief objection, nevertheless, brought against Protection is that its results must be to enrich a small class of the community at the expense of the great majority, and one of the first duties of a Minister pledging himself to support a Protective tariff, as Mr. Ballance has done, might well be to prove to the public that such a charge was false, rather than to speak so as to confirm that charge. But the question, in fact, — whatever may be tho case concerning the benefits to be gamed — is not confined to any two particular sections of the community, being, on the contrary, of very general interest — and that it is felt to be so is plainly proved if only by the manner in which the contest in Dunedin is being watched and commented on by the Press of the Colony. What is at stake is the advancement or stagnation of the country as a whole, in comparison with which the interests of any particular class, however important they may otherwise be, seem utterly insignificant. There is not much, meantime, to encourage in an utterance whose drift is to show us that one, at least, of those gentlemen in whose hands the fortunes of the Colony are placed has made up his mind on a vital subject evidently without carefully examining it, and more as a matter of arbitrary choice, or, perhaps, of private influences, than anything else. If Protection can be shown to be a mere question between importers and manufacturers, the question is evidently decided already, and in full accordance with the objections brought against the system. Mr. Ballancb, while professing himself a Protectionist, supports the strongest argument of the Freetrader,