SHIRKING THE ISSUE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 26, 25 October 1907, Page 4

SHIRKING THE ISSUE.

Ix yesterday's issue we found it necessary to take our evening contemporary to task for the very transparent fallacies which it advanced in support of its contention that lease-in-perpetuity tenants who desire to convert their leases into freeholds should pay the present value of- their holdings. Our contemporary's reply may be taken as an admirable specimen of the form of argument which it is safest to adopt when'facts and logic are wanting to support one's case. We are told we have drawn a red herring across'the scent,, and in effect that : 'we are, after all, merely an infant still in our swaddling clothes. But the battery of. broad grins and strange similes with which our elderly contemporary assails us from the other side of the fence docs nothing to diminish the force of our reasoning, and is equally ineffectual to build up a case to-support its own astonishing contention. AVe may sigh at the spectacle of old ago donning'the cap and bells, and, in our infantile innocence, may marvel at the_ attitude of a venerable journal which so plainly suggests that it has forgotten the flight of time arid the spread of intelligence amongst its readers. But' we cannot hope- to cure these amiable weaknesses. There is one point on which it seems desirable to take our contemporary seriously. It states that we neglected the point it meant to make in order to attack a side issue. The point in question was the contention that a transferee who has bought the goodwill of a lease will not . pay twice over for the goodwill if he 'purchases at the present value._ It seemed to us a mere question of simple arithmetic, of one and one making two, but we are taken to task for neglecting this main point and going off into a by-path. Really, when a critic div-

ides liis argument into two parts, to one of which he devotes seventy lines and to the other eleven and a half lines, we can hardly be blamecl for not knowing that the seventy imes were merely an incidental illustration and the eleven and a half lines the main point. But, not to neglect the point, now that it has been raised, it is only necessary to say that a man who pays for the goodwill, and again for the orginal value, plus the' goodwill, has paid twice for something. If age produces such a paralysing effect as conversion tot-he theory that one plus one is one, life has little to offer.