A SICKENING FARCE.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 215, 30 October 1888, Page 2

A SICKENING FARCE.

Our Governmental institutions have surely degraded to a low condition. We have now the disgraceful spectacle presented to us of nearly all the Ministers “ gallivanting ” about, and three of them actually ch drawing their £2O a week, doing absolutely nothing for it, and spending it in another colony. The Ministers of Defence, Public Works, and Education arc away in Australia, where no doubt they will make themselves happy with a sight of the Melbourne Cup race, while the unfortunate taxpayers have to grind out a hard and precarious livelihood. The AttorneyGeneral draws his £BOO a year, with other emoluments, lives in Auckland, and attends to his private practice and hie business as Director of the Bank ot New Zealand and other companies. And yet all the public servants of the Igwer grade have been mercilessly reduced, and takes have been heaped on to every article on which it is possible to increase them, whilst the public purse is thus being shamefully drained. To call thia sort of thing a scandal is to use very moderate language. Still we suppose this questionable procedure must be lawful, and the fact that exists is the fault of those who have to pay for it. The Wellington Press, in an article on the subject, puts the matter very strongly. The article concludes as follows:—

“ Have they no shame, no sense of decency at all ? Does it not seem monstrous that the people should be made to slave and toil and pinch, to keep these men in luxury and idleness and enable them to indulge every selfish whim and gratify every vanity? When we read in the columns of a respected contemporary a touching letter signed “Nine Mouths to Fill" describing the hardships of respectable poor colonists in this city, we could not help thinking of our three Ministers jauntnig off to the Melbourne Exhibition. We read these words : The books of the Benevolent Institution do not contain a twentieth part of the cases of distress existing, and being silently borne so long as the little ones get enough to sustain life, even if it consists, as it often does, of tho coarsest food. ” We knew them to ho true; and we turned our thoughts with a thrill of indig. nation from the painful scenes they indicate, to the three Ministers having their holiday, revelling in the best of everything, with their £2O a week each, and all their expenses paid for them by the very people so many of whom are struggling with all their might and silently enduring' Untold privations to get enough coarse food to sustain life in their little ones. What a sickening farce it is to talk of retrenchment while this sort of thing goes on. But there surely must be a limit beyond which injustice and selfseeking may not go ; and we cannot help thinking the time is not distant when tho people will tell these Ministers in a votes not to bo mistaken, that they have already passed that limit.