ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16484, 25 February 1914, Page 8

ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES.

It must be extremely embarrassing to the Prime Minister to find himself with millions of money to spend m election year. On the eve of the last general election he laid down for the admiration of the world at large the very proper principle that when an appeal was about to he made to the constituencies the Government should be particularly careful in its expenditure. There should bo no increase in salaries, he said, no special activity in public works, no large grants to local bodies, no promises of roads and bridges, no appearance, in short, of any attempt to influence votes by an unusual display of liberality. All this, of course, was intended to imply that the Liberal Ministers then in office were not actuated by tho nice sense if propriety the Reformers had conceived for themselves. Still it was very admirable. But now Mr Massey has millions of cheap money at his disposal and is being pestered by hundreds of deputations clamouring for assistance in one way or another. His excellent precepts of two or three years ago have had to be adapted to the altered circumstances. During his present tour of the East Coast of the North Island he has discovered many good reasons for modifying the “ self-deny-ing ordinance ” he would have imposed upon his political opponents. He has turned a. not unkindly ear to the deputations that have come to him with requests for roads and bridges, he has promised the dairymen £l2 a head instead of £8 a. head for diseased stock that may be destroyed under the law, ho has invited the fruit-growers “to come along to the State for loans,” he has undertaken that land for settlement shall bo provided along the routes of the railways now in course of construction, and in a score of other ways ho has played the fairy godmother to the good folk of the country-side. We do not wish to suggest that his openhanded attitude is not justified by the needs of the people he is meeting '■ n his travels, but we should like to -e----mind him that when his predecessors :n office “found out what the public wanted and gave it to them” he was not exactly generous in his comments upon their concern for tho welfare of the community. We trust that when he is again in Opposition he will remember that the business of the country must go on even when a general election is impending.