Chronic State of Debt

Feilding Star, Volume IX, Issue 14, 19 July 1887, Page 3

Chronic State of Debt

A late issue of the Mercantile and Bankruptcy Gazette contains an article on one aspect of the fashionable object—debt. As this journal must be recognised as an authority on the subject j wexqttote the following : — " The people who owe money are the middle classes and the so-called lower ones. Take the professional classes. Many of the persons engaged in practice of the learned professions are earning good incomes, and are yet 'doing' bills with the loan and discount offices; the smaller traders cutting each other's throats trying to make a profit in the operation of selling goods at a less price than they buy them for; the clerks in the various offices, many of them able to dress only by reason of their tailor consenting to give them credit ; the tailor himself, who is forced to borrow because he cannot meet his bills ; the artisan, not out of employment, who cannot make his ends meet because he will not practice economy, and who prefers to spend what he cannot earn rather than deprive himself j of items of luxury, are all fair samples of the evil we allege. Going lower, we find that even the boys who sell papers in the street owe, in some eases, three or four pounds for papers, the proceeds of which they have received and spent. And so it is air throughout the colony. The man who drives in his carriage probably has a bill of sale, registered or unregistered, over it; the one who cleans your boots at the street corner has most likely not paid for his brushes, and; another thing, does not intend to do so. The result is, persons become so accustomed to owing money that they think nothing of it ; they do not feel ashamed to meet a man to whom they are indebted ; they look into his face with a patronising air, and walk on as if he owed them money, when perhaps they have been. his debtor for months. , Restrictions of credit would be the cure. Let the butchers, bakers, drapers, et hoe genus omne, follow the example of the grocers and do business for cash ; let the tailors shut their books and say to the man who wants .clothes, "You must pay before you get them ; " let the children be taught that debt means disgrace, and then perhaps, in twenty years, when the present generation has passed away—no good trying to do anything with them, their complaint lies too deep — the people of New Zealand may be ablejto shake off from their shoulders the]weight which is now crushing then} to pieces."

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