The Dominion. FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1909. THRIFT VERSUS STATE AID.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 579, 6 August 1909, Page 4

The Dominion. FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 1909. THRIFT VERSUS STATE AID.

The opposition which the British Government's proposals for unemployment insurance.aro encountering at the hands, of some of the great British friendly societies will remind the New Zealand public of the unexpected hostility with which the friendly societies here greeted Me. Seddon's schemo of national annuities. The stand • which has been taken up by the Manchester Unity and tho- Foresters must be regarded, in these days of increasing dependence on the State, as • a very hopeful sign that self-reliance is yet very far from having been trained out of the British people. The, objections which have boen raised against tho British Government's proposal's are based upon the unwisdom of discouraging voluntary thrift, and although the Government is urging that its scheme will merely be something in supplement of tbc-splendid work'of the societies, there can be little doubt that it will oporato against the growth, and therefore against the stability, of the.voluntary associations of selfhelp. If it be admitted—and. it can hardly be denied—that a State system of 'compulsory ineurance, whether againet iUUemElbimeiiti. invalidity,' ox ■ old ag^

will in a short time greatly reduce, if it does not extinguish, the growth of membership of the societies, it must be further admitted that tho societies will ultimately suffer a financial collapse, and then disappear. At the last estimate, the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows had a membership'of 1,033,701, and possessed assets of the value of £22,771,250. The great weakness of all.old-established societies is the natural growth of the proportion of old people. Unless sufficient new and young members are made to counterbalance the increased strain of providing for the older members, the societies milst become financially weak. If the supply of new members is cut off,, the funds-will in time disappear altogether. ■The.ultimate result of State action, which eitts away the incentive to new members to jojn, cannot therefore be otherwise than the complete extinction of the friendly societies' .movement. Nobody but the most exclusive and rigid sort of Socialist will'say that that is an end to be welcomed. .

The position of tho self-reliant individualism of the societies was , well put by Mr. Kilvinqton, the Grand Master of tho Manchsster Unity, at the annual conference at Bradford in June last: "Let the (jbvernment," he said, "make provision for the halt, the lame, and the blind," and those who were incapacitated from conforming-to the requirements of a sound friendly society; "but," he added,'"if an attempt is made to set up a State-aided; compulsory and iniquitous form of competition with the voluntary thrift movement which has done so much to build up and mould the true character of tho masses of this country, I fearlessly assert that we are setting the clock a century back." Me. KilvinqTon emphasised the very important fact that Cabinet Ministers and theorists are not so competent to express an opinion on the matter as those who have given the best part of their lives-to the development of true thrift amongst the industrial dasses, and he summed up very fairly the basic article of faith of those who advocate what has been called '"humanism" when he said that they "imagine that all the* evils from which the nation is suffering can be put right by smothering voluntary individual effort, and relying entirely on tho State." - The Unity's is by no means a dbg-in-the-niangei , policy, for, as one oi the speakers at the conference pointed out, the directors, "while opposing anything they believed would endanger the position of, the voluntary societies and militate against the great cause of selfreliance, yet if there was a, residuum of the people that the friendly societies could not reach by . reason of ill-health, they would help to the beat of their ability,; to provide, the machinery for such cases." '.' ,

But there are subsidiary objections to State action hardly less strong than the fact that it will militate against thrift. The form in which the chief of these objections was stated by a Liverpool delegate at the Manchester Unity's conference exposes a very wholesome truth that Dr. Findlay, and other people who talk of the State as if it were an all-wise and boundlessly wealthy Providence, seem always to overlook. "He wishcd'p r coplc : to remember," said this-delegate, "that they were State, and'they did not,get anything frpm the State unless they first paidit in. If they wanted eighteenpence from the State they, probably were going, to pay half-a-crown for it, and members of friendly societies objected, to paying half-a-crown for eighteenpence in order to set up opposition to their own societies and undermine their .independence.?' Waste is inseparable from State action, as the people of New Zealand have had many opportunities of seeing for themselves. We have only to point to the extraordinary waste that accompanies the administration of Charitable Aid in thia country. Most of the distress that is always present'in greater or less measuro is due to thriftlessncss. At Tuesday's meeting of the Benevolent Trustees mention was made of a case in which- an applicant for relief had until recently been earning seven pounds a week. The great dangers of a State system of insurance are its discouragement of thrift, and its unavoidable wastefulness. The halfcrown which the community pays in and which comes as eighteenpence would remain half-a-crown under friendly societies' management. If, as seems possible, our own Government is determined to bring in some scheme of insurance against unemployment, we hope that it will not fail to adopt the only really wise proposal in Me Seddon's national annuities scheme: namely, the recognition of membership of a friendly society as t claim for special consideration.