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Hokitika Guardian, 27 December 1917, Page 2

Tub accounts from all parts indicate that the Christmas traffic is very substantial. Affluent New Zealand is

able to keep pace with the times, even if the cost of living and pleasuring is steadily rising. Good humoured, well dressed crowds are everywhere, and boats, trains, motors and coaches are all crowded uncomfortably. Locally yesterday was an ideal day for a holiday, but the Railway Department made no arrangement for the usul Boxing Day traffic, except that we must make this reservation—the oldest tvpe of dog-box passenger ear was added to (lie rolling stock on the Ross line! The train wtis crowded to excess, and a car was taken off the Grey section, and an open truck also commandeered. These together with the guard’s van. and engine cab, all platforms and any where whore humanity could hang on, were crammed and jammed. Tf this experience was happening till over New Zealand, and no doubt it transpired in all places where the sun shone as genially as here, some thousands upon thousands of votes of no confidence in the management of the New Zealand

railways must have been passed'. Everybody is asking the why and "the wherefore of the discomfort, inconycni once and risk and expense in other transit, put upon the public, and why when revenue, is said to be so urgently required a lucrative revenue such as the railways for flowing" holiday receipts is not used to its fullest capacity. The British public is becoming “riled” and no wonder at such glaring mismanagement.

Treue are those who look for the final victory in the Great War to b© directed from the air. America is making immense preparations for an aerial campaign on the battle fronts in the coming year. Sir Edward Morris, whom we have first quoted, supplies some interesting details of the vastness of the preparations in the. United vStates for the deciding phase of the 1918 campaign. He said:—“One day at Washington I watched the maneuuvring of three big Italian warplanes. They were circling round tlio tall Washington Monument, after a hundred mile flight from an army aelodrome. in the neighbouring State. A distinguished Urfited States meditating on the war in the air of which those graceful Italian machines were harbingers, said: ‘Air supremacy will belong to the United States before the war is over.’ I would like to tell people in Britain why the senator’s statement is no. idle boast. It is manifestly nothing but a pledge of future events because the Americans arc arranging to put in almost tlicir host ‘licks’ on the air campaign. They have already appropriated nearly £200,000,000 fob it They are training 100,000 youths to be airmen. They are ready to build machines literally by the fens of thousands. The best engineering brains of the country have buried the competitive hatchet and evolved the Liberty engine, from which great mechanical results are honed for. This time (October) next year at the outside—probably long before that—the Americans as they put it to me, are going to run a day-and-night air service to Berlin. They are going to drop bombs in Germany from the sky at something approximating the rate at which Haig and Petalin are now dropping shells over the German linos in Flanders and France. Do people in these islands realise that the money America is spendng on aircraft' and air preparations alone exceeds the sum total of our old Imperial pro- vnr Budget for the Military, naval, and civil Services Icomhined ? And docs anybody hereabouts know that the Air Bill appropriating this ‘billion dollars’ was passed by the United States Senate after just three hours of debate ?”