RED TAPE AND A SICK MAN.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1746, 10 May 1913, Page 3

RED TAPE AND A SICK MAN.

Sir,—Under the above caption you publish as sad and sordid a story of man's inhumanity to man as ever was told outside the pages of Dickens or Charles Reade. Few persons in this ■ country imagined that such an outrage was possible. Now that the press has made tho cruel fact that it is possible common property throughout Australasia., mayhap steps will b9 taken to render its recurrence, even in the case of a blackfellow, no longer possible. What can be tho frame of mind of those responsible for this outrage, for no other term fits the situation? No other term as well describes the case of the dying consumptive wandering hopelessly about tho inhospitable wharves of Port Lyttelton. What, I ask, is the normal mental and moral make-up of persons who have such profound veneration for red tape that even the ordinary claims of siclt and suffering humanity a lie .subordinated to it? "Barry belonged to Wellington, and "the hospital authorities hero refused to take him in for that reason-," runs the press message from Christchurch. We invito the people of Eurone and elsewhere 'to come liere, and witliin 24 hours of tlieir arrival, if they need it, they can secure hospital treatment. Neither they nor theirs may have ever lifted a hand 'to assist the progress of our country —that matters not; ilicy are taken in and cared for. But a consumptive fireman, who has probably spent years of his life here, doing his share of the countrj s work,'is iturned out on the wharves on a winter's night! It is a queer world, my masters, but it never saw anything much queerer than this. _ It will, of course, be recognised that the case of Barry, reprinted in tho English and Continental papers, will do more, to scare away immigrants than all the Socialistic flapdoodle talked by tho Red Federationists—l am, etc., gpgjjQ jjEUOKA.