MR MACANDREW AND THE UNIVERSITY COUNCIL.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3018, 26 February 1881, Page 2

MR MACANDREW AND THE UNIVERSITY COUNCIL.

" Civis," in the Otago Witness, says:-—

Dickens, with a moral fitness which everybody recognises, makes Mr Miuawber take up his final quarters in Australia. There was a scope for Mr Micawber's airy and expansive financial genius in the New World, there waa none in the Old. To Dickens, and the readers of Dickens, Australia stood for a region where enterprise was not necessarily hampered by want of capital, and where a speculator of optimist temperament might without unreason, count on the eventuality of " something turning up." In his native haunts Mr Micawber's operations were all paralysed by that fatal want of > capital. Speaking of her visit with her husband to the Medway, Mrs Micawber re- . marked : "My opinion of the coal trade on. that river is, that it may require talent, but that it certainly requires capital. Talent Mr Micawber has ; capital Mr Micawber has not." Talent when combined, as in. Mr Micawber, with a total of want of capital and a singular incapacity for obtaining it, has always had a vocation for the colonies, and accordingly the Micawbers are despatched to Australia. New Zealand would have served the novelist's purpose as well; but New Zealand was little thought of thirty years ago, and we have imported our Micawbera later, and under other names. Mr Macandrew won't take it ill, I'm sure, if I avow that what has led me to this Micawber reminiscence is his recent letter to the University Council. Forty thousand pounds—no more, and no less —is what Mr Macandrew recommends the Council to expend in creating a Publio Library. Where are they to get the money from —no ? Nothing easier responde Mr Macandrew; capitalise your rent from *+ Barewood, and the thing is done. Now this idea of " capitalising " —that is, selling —the rent of a sheep run for forty thousand down, strikes me as conceived in Mr Micawber's best style—particularly when Iremem* ber that said [sheep run, as Mr Macandrew himself suggests, may be resumed by the Q-overnment at any time. Talk of financial kite-flying —this is financial ballooning. It is as though Mr Macandrew, when asked where the forty thousand was to come v from, had said, Oh, sign a big bill for it, • and then thank God that that's off your mind! How came Mac to hit on exactly forty thousand pounds—neither more nor less? I can't tell, unless because*forty thousand is a fine round Micawberish figure, which sounds well in an estimate. It imparts an air of careless magnificence exactly suited to the proposals of a financier with talent but without capital. Forty thousand pounds, unless lam mistaken, was the cost of the palatial Post Office erected under the Macandrian anoien regime, a building subsequently assigned through Mr Macandrew's influence for University purposes, found unsuitable, and sold for something over twenty thousand. Absit omen J