THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 170, 8 April 1918, Page 4

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

ITS MANIFOLD DIFFICULTIES. The National Government was defended by Sir Joseph Ward when 110 addressed employees at the Woolston Tanneries, Christchurch, on .Saturday. He referred to the difficult problems that sprang up, and said that the position was much more difficult than most people believed. It was absolutely necessary to raise large loans. Ho hoped that the man of small means would invest in them. There was no safer investment in the world. The loans had behind them not only the whole of Now .Zealand, but also all the people of New Zealand and all their properties, on which taxation might be levied. 'There was no better security than the whole, of New Zealand—no equal security in fact. When the halanco of the present loan of £9,500,000 was spent, another very large sum must be honoured. Tho money was solely for war purposes. It was to provide for men at the front and for those who were going to tho front, that the large sums bad to be borrowed. In addition to finding money for war purposes, the ordinary reouirements or the people had to be met. The Government was like a man going to and from his work, and who suddenly found that the t'ood.pfth he had used had been turned into a quagmire by an undercurrent. Difficulties of that character beset the Nrfonal Government. If the National Government had not made mistakes it would be superhuman, and no members of the Government professed to le superhuman. Tbero were people, apparently, who, if he was to believe what they said, were so exceptional as to be superhuman, but he could not find them. Letters and leading arncles in the newspapers told the Government how to obtain money. The only trrable was that the writers did not bear the responsibility. If the Government failed to obtain money it could not pav the country's soldiers, It would mean repudiation of the pi maples those at the front wore fighting for. New Zealand was too far away from the battlefields-some 13,000 or 14,000 miles-to see the whole fiffair. It saw only the reflection of the f.-adow ot the war. He had seen some ci tho immediate effects, and nothing.was more appalling than Franco's devastated areas.