FINANCIAL WIZARDRY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2141, 17 March 1908, Page 2

FINANCIAL WIZARDRY.

(From the 'Wellington “Post”) “Now you see it, now you don t sec it,” says Sir Joseph, tapping tho Surplus witli his magical wand. “Ladies and Gentlemen, behold this beautiful pudding. "Watch mo close. 1 iiufc it into the Hat of Public "Works Fund. There. Where is it? Its gone. Queer, isn’t it? Here it is now,” and bir Joseph extracts the pudding from the hat of the London money lender, thirteen thousand .miles array. The people gasp, and ask for big slices of tlio lovely compost, and the cook gratifies them, and the man in London enters it all up in a book. It is high treason ill Now Zealand to question the expediency of devoting £35,000 of borrowed money to a railway station and £30,000 to a bath house for tlio tourist person. People with a fair endowment of common-sense, who urge that the country should be very chary about the use of loans ,aro described as croakers bv the Government and its apologists. The charge against the sensible critics is very absurd. They do not prophesy an area of gloom ;they do not conjure up shocking pictures of misery and want; they do not assert that the bottom is falling out of these islands; but they say that Dunedin could havo survived without a £35,000 railway station and that the tourist and health seeker could have been satisfied with something less pretentious than a £30,000 spa, buiß with borrowed money. The Little Now' Zealanders are not the alleged “croakers,” but the patent caeklers and cla'kpueurs who have not vision enough to see further than an 1.0. U., and not balance enough to knoiv the difference between sane poliev and utter foolishness. The saviours of New Zealand (there may be saviours by-and-by) will not be manufacturers of National Debt..