THE PRESENT DEPRESSION.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2230, 21 April 1881, Page 3

THE PRESENT DEPRESSION.

TO THB BDITOB OP THE PBBSB. Sib, —It is a matter of astonishment to me that with all the addresses from members of Assembly so little real notice has been taken of the present depression. We have been told muoh about our shortcomings, our want of thrift, and so on, but no one except Mr Hutchison, at Wellington, has touohed the subject more. I wish to ask Mr Stevens, if you will allow me, what he thinks about it ? I do so thus because the immensity of the subject is not easily answered on sudden occasion. Will Mr Stevens tell us his views ? Should such an appalling visitation as we have passed through be dismissed by a few curb sentences ? Is it not a grave subject, requiring a Royal Commission to enquire into ? Is this wretched country to be periodically swept by a financial hurricane, desolating homes, lowering the moral standard of the people, and leaving a wreck behind sad to contemplate ? Are we to allow our country to be in contempt throughout the world, and not try and see why it is bo, and how euch a state of things can be avoided, and how they ocourred ? Surely, Sir, the House of Assembly should be specially called together to consider such a matter. When we see, as we did recently, the socuritios of a place like Fiji, a place that should not be compared to New Zealand, that might be swept at any time by a tornado and and half ruined—when, I say, we see the securities of such a place actually preferred to our own, it is not a time of humiliation. Our Government are continually legislating for the people's welfare. Take sheep and cattle for an instance. When any arrive here, should there be a bit off a oow's tail, or the slightest breath of suspicion against these brutes, there is a Board to sit on the subject, and I have seen cases in the papers of most severe measures, all for the poople's good. Again, we see harsh legislation against publicans, a man may owe as much as he likes, but he must not drink as much as he likes. The law says over a certain amount for drink supplied you need not pay, and so on. I do not wish to mention more cases and take up your valuable space, but will express a hope that as when a house is burnt down the people work together and quench the fire, and then the Government step in and hold an inquiry and see how it occurred, who was to blame, and how a repetition can be avoided, so we may find the Assembly of ast year putting out the fire, so to speak, and the coming Assembly holding a searching enquiry, and employing drastic measures to prevent a recurrence. There must be a very prominent cause to work out such an awful effect. In the Pbbss recently a statement appaared compiled from statistics, that recent failures actually reached the sum of one and a half millions of money in tho provinces of Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury and Otago. I doubt there being 50,000 people in all businesses in the provinces combined. It's a nice place is New Zealand. A Vbby Old Colonist. Ohristchurch, April 20th, 1881.