AID TO MUNICIPALITIES.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 286, 12 May 1875, Page 2

AID TO MUNICIPALITIES.

To the Editor of the Globe. Sir, —I was pleased yesterday on reading your leader of Monday, and Mayor Hobbs' manly letter on the estimates of the Provincial Government.

1 should like to see more such display of public spirit on so great a question as that of the distribution of public monies. I am satisfied that if a proper estimate of the relative importance and just claims of large centres of population were entertained, no member of our Provincial Parliament, however his direct personal interest might otherwise suggest, would hesitate to support a claim for the city of Christchurch at once liberal and ample.

I was never more astonished than when I learned of late the truly miserable income of this large city—without fees and without endowments. What can the inhabitants have been about to permit such a state of things ? Here we have a city amply spaced, yet liable at any time to be decimated by disease and death, and actually subject to a shameful mortality through the want of precautionary measures, which, for want of funds, our City Council is utterly unable to adopt. That \vc have no rich endowments is the fault of the older citizens; but that is no sufficient

reason why we should continue to lack the most necessary element of success, while the public almoner is rich to overflowing. But we may go beyond this claim of poverty, and demand as our right, besides endowments, the full share of that capitation fund, the very name of which suggests the proportion of our claim. The lavish expenditure of public money upon institutions, from which none but a favoured few can ever expect to derive more than a transient pleasure, is neither wise nor fair, while others, deserving of more support, because of their immense benefit to a far larger portion of the community, are suffering for want of funds. It is well to foster science, as in the case of our Museum, but how many of this community are, or care to be, far enough advanced to be largely benefited by such an institution ?

And, after all, it becomes a question of pushing science beyond the requirements of the people. I am disposed to think that present requirements are fully met in the existing, and very creditable, Museum, and that, instead of lavishing the large sum now proposed for extension, if the same, or a larger sum, were expended on a Public Library for the general diffusion of more ordinary and practical knowledge, thus educating the masses up to the standard of appreciation of those higher branches of learning with which some are so desperately enamoured, the money would be well expended in the permanent good of the people, and the lasting honour of our legislators. Party politics, always undesirable, should be avoided as much as possible, but in a colony like this it will ever be the duty of citizens to maintain their full representation in Parliament, and to insist upon their representatives being pledged to secure the proper interests of the chief city of the province.

Centralisation is rapidly undermining provincial institutions, and as rapidly the day is coming when the country will be in the hands of a rich oligarchy, and then citizens may labour long, sixbject to penalties and privations, superinduced by their own criminal neglect. Yours, &c, B. C.