The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1911.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3313, 4 September 1911, Page 4

The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVE RY MORNING. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1911.

Some very hard things have at times 1 ■ 'ien written as ell as said with jgard to the ex_jnt to which the Colonies find themselves compelled to raise loans It would, howe'ver, be difficult, we think, to surpass the latest to hand of a series of articles on this subject in the “Investors’ Review.” On behalf of the Comrqonwealth Government the . High Commissioner (Sir George Reid) had in reply to earlier adverse criticism by the journal in question made a great point of the fact that out of £54,000,000 borrowed by Australia since the Commonwealth started, and up to June 30, 1910, no less than £37,000,000 was raised in

“The Pn'mrcse . v Way.” i

Australia and only the balance in London. In this connection the “Review” was prepared to admit that if none of the “internal” loans drifted over or were actually sold in London that may he accepted as a gratifying proof that Australians have for the time being benefited in their domestic credit facilities by the bountiful harvests of recent years as well as by British money. But, according to the “Review,” there was another phase of Colonial borrowing tnat was equally important. It was this: The public debt has continued to increase faster than the population made responsible for it. “No old debt,” it proceeds, “is ever paid off or can be genuinely paid off, although dates of repayments are always fixed when a new loan is floated. All debts are renewed when they fall due, advantage being usually taken of the binproved credit’ produced by long indulgence in trie habit of loan raising, and above all by the inclusion of colonial stocks in the British ‘Trustee list,’ to re-borrow at lower rates of interest. “That,” the “Review” says, “is called ‘a saving,’ and the people go gaily on down the primrose way.” (With reference to this aspect of the question, it might be recalled that the New Zealand Government has now inaugurated a system of sinking funds to meet loans as they may fall due). In its indictment of the financial position of tire colonies, however, the “Review” considers that the population of Australia —and that of New Zealand—has already mortgaged its future to an extent which already cripples its resourcefulness and fecundity, and makes it assume the aspect of a nation growing effete! “The debt-piling usagesto which Australians have become bondsmen,” it says, “represent not only a loss of liberty, a loosening of the moral fibre of communities nurtured in cheap self-indulgence—it is so ‘cheap’ to borrow when one never pays hack—but a positive crime against posterity. Men now living have no right, moral or other, to make life hard for those who come after them, and the Australian politician confesses he has none by paying phrase tribute to morality in fixing a redemption term for every loan raised. It is a mock allegiance to principle which covers a real betrayal, and already the punishment of the betrayers lias begun.” With Australia especially in view, the “Review” continues its severe strictures. “The fruits of their laches,” it remarks, “are found in the increasing sycophancy of the colonial attitude towards much that is least admirable in modern civilisation and public life—a cringing truculencv, it may he called ; in a decline of moral courage among Australian public men, who more and more become the tools of communities, themselves reduced to slavery by over-indulgence in recourse to the usurer. In a material sense also punishment dogs the footsteps of the sinners, and already this young nation, most of whose land lies fallow, which thinks the harvest year favorable that gives it an average of 12 bushels of wheat to the acre on the trivial area it cultivates, finds want creeping over it; and accordingly its miseries have made it load itself with an old-age pensions charge which at present amounts to 6s per head of the entire population. Soon pensions will put a claim for more than £2,000,000 per annum upon top of the £12,000,000 or thereby the public debts yearly suck up. The organisations of labor which are now masters of the country will see to that. Whoever starves, they do not mean to. What they ask must be given, and they have been so long kept full stomached by the corrupt and debasing flood of borrowed gold streamed in upon them that they have grown arrogant. What they have already secured only whets the appetite for more, and the power to compel is with them. No politician can live dad prosper in Australia who resists the demands of Labor. To grow fat and to open the way to secure title baubles the politician must truckle, even when he dare not wholly obey. Labor in possession does not want immigrants to compete and reduce wages; therefore all immigration schemes must be shams, however costly. Labor growls ever more

ominously against its many fetters, atthe taxes it has to pay, at the ‘drain’ of wealth out of the country in payment of rent and interest; and therefore it is ever plotting to throw its fetters off, to make someone else hear its burden. Failing all other methods, it will turn on the alien creditor and fling him ofiP The pampered, loan-fed-up democracy of Australia will one day take its revenge. The crime of the facile, let-us-wallow-in-debt politician is thus visibly bringing its or./ punishment. But no one can forecast how long it may be before honest and high-minded Australians scent their danger; and one can only hope that will he in time to enable them to turn the nation round and seek a better path to honor and independence.” This, then, is a fair outline of what it will he agreed constitutes the most caustic criticism on Colonial borrowing that has appeared for a considerable time.