THE FREE PASS SYSTEM.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 86, 15 May 1877, Page 3

THE FREE PASS SYSTEM.

We have heard, through the columns of the Press, how an M.H.R., travelling for a Christchurch produce-merchant, has been using his member's pass in travelling upon the the railway lines of the Colony. Whether this system is likely to develop into anything more serious we know not. The London Times, however, does not admire the free-pass system, and thus refers to its effects :—" All the M.P.'s in South Carolina, (says the special correspondent of the Times), have free passes on the State railways, and some of these sable law-makers who cannot, or will not, provide themselves with lodgings when discharging their parliamentary duties during the session, take advantage of the free passes to turn the trains into bedrooms, and habitually spend their nights in them. The correspondent asks us to imagine ourselves goyerned and taxed by legislators of this stamp, and then we shall have, he saye, some notion of what the white

men of South Carolina have had to suffer in the matter of taxation during the whole period of reconstruction. Our readers will perhaps be surprised to know that this singular practice of turning the railways of the State into lodg-ing-houses is not confined to the lines which converge on Charlestown. Precisely the same custom prevails in the British Colony of Victoria. Members of Parliament there travel free on the Government railways, and we are not to wonder that it is owing to this description of legislator that a British colony is cursed with a protectorate policy, by which English-made boots and shoes, and many such like useful things, are taxed in order that a few Victorians who are makers of boots, trousers, and other personal necessaries may command their own profits."