NOTES OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1494, 17 July 1912, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY.

lit another column we give to-day some striking figures relating to tramways finance which the Tramway Board of Management has prepared for the City Council. Can anyone wonder, when he sees the enormous growth of expenditure fortified hy the granting of extravagant concessions, that in six years the system, as a traffic system, has arrived at' the threshold of a deficit? The expenditure has increased under every head relatively to the work' done. The expenses per car-mile, that is to say, arc grcatcivjunder every head, The charge for-repairs and maintenance has increased enormously. Per car-mile, it is actually 60 per cent greater, than in 1905-6, and the rate of growth will continue, since every year the cars and track grow older. The system has arrived at the •stage when specially careful financewould be' necessary in normal •circumstances, but the circumstances are so abnormal that unless a change is made there will _ actually be a deficit on the running for the current year. A good deal, no doubt, can be done by stopping the leaks in the administration, and a good deal more by improving the timetable, but in view of the enormous sums'.lost in concessions (£7333 in 1911-12, of which the concessions to •''workers" accounted ior nearly £5000), it is obvious that'the revenue 'side must be attended to at once. We that .the Council will resist the interested protests against the Board's proposal to readjust the sections and cut out some of the concessions. The city cannot afford, unless it wants to see the tramway finances drift into hopeless confusion, to makc_ presents to sections of the community. If the tramways are run at a loss the ratepayers will have to make good the deficit: the ratepayers, in fact, will have to pay part of the fares of other people. This would-be an intolerable injustice' -, The. system must be made to pay its way and to pay itself out of debt; and to delay the reform so urgently necessary will only create a tougher problem for solution at some later time. \

The Christian Socialists, and those Radicals who do not mind using Socialist weapons, are still at intervals repeating their favourite assertion, that "Christ was the first Socialist." The fallacy has often heen exposed: it was very satisfactorily dealt with not long ago by Archbishop Redwood. In his able little book on Conservatism Lord Hugh Cecil has some deep .observations upon the point. "There is not a line of the New Testament," he points out, "that can be quoted in favour of the enlargement of ' the function of the Stato_ beyond the elementary duty of maintaining order and repressing crime." Indeed the State is almost entirely in the background in the New Testament pages, where the teaching is addressed to the individual conscience and the only social organisation is "the Kingdom of Heaven." In the Sermon on the Mount the State is never mentioned. The Socialist claptrap makes its appeal only to those who, "thinking loosely- and speaking vaguely have been accustomed to assume that anything 'that seems to exalt the poor against the rich partakes of the character of Socialism." In point of fact riches and poverty are in the Gospels invariably treated from a viewpoint exactly opposite to that of the Socialist. If Lord Hugh Cecil is not an acceptable witness, even when he states plain facts, few people would reject Cardinal Manning. The. new London Labour paper recently printed a characteristic and thitherto unpublished letter of the Cardinal's, in the course of which is litis .striking passage: 1 object to the use of the word "Socialism" except in its strict and precise sense. It is a word of evil-meaning, like nationalism—and signifies abuse, misuse and exaggeration. ' Society governs ond legislates for itsplf "socially," that is normally, and in conformity with its own nature, but social is not Socialistic, as rational is not Rationalistic. The Author of Christianity has indeed given in all the laws that perfect the Society of M'.in. Hut Socialism is the revolutionary parody of His perfect Micial legislation.

under which the defendant was convicted was precisely that section of the. 1910 Act which so dissatisfied us in the form in which it was first left —that' our criticism persur.dcd Sn. John Fixdlay, then Attorney-Gen-eral, to harden it up. He was very emphatic in his references to the bookmaker in all his speeches. "I thought he was wiped out," a Councillor interjected during his second reading speech, and thp AttorneyGeneral replied: "No; but we have left as small a place for the sole of his foot as we, not being able to go the whole hog and declare his calling illegal, could .allow." H:' hoped and believed that in the end the bookmaker "would be eradicated root and branch." This was sounJ. politics, and it was none, the less sound pleading when Silt Jcmi' Findlay on Monday spoke, in what was apparently a tone of regret, of the .disappearance, so far as the bookmaker was concerned, of the old maxim that a man's house was his castle.' As a lawyer and as a legislator a man has two distinct and le-. gitiraate functions to perform, but even those of us who recognise this may be allowed to enjoy the clearness with which, as a lawyer, Sir John Fixdlay can see as a fair matter, for argument the stringency of a statute which as a legislator he was unable to think of as anything but excellent.