RETRENCHMENT AND REFORM.

Marlborough Express, Volume III, Issue 96, 11 January 1868, Page 5

RETRENCHMENT AND REFORM.

The last mail shows that affairs are in a bad way in Auckland, where it is under consideration to throw up the charge of the province to the General Government. In an article under the above heading, the Herald shows that in the Resident Magistrate’s Courts in that province the average cost per case is from 11s. lid. at Onehunga, to £B2 at the Ivaipara! The writer urges that the members of the Council and the Assembly should “ cease fighting with shadows ” and attack this gigantic evil, and not to stand nerveless and passively watching the progress of the evil and doing nothing to arrest it. We make the following extract showing that in Auckland as in Marlborough, the feeling obtains that a Bench of Petty Justices would be more suited to their means

“ The Provincial Council, as a Council, and the representatives of the people in Parliament, must inevitably be charged with the continuance of present exti’avagance. Mr. Stafford threw down a challenge to the provinces to retrench. Not one province took up the challenge. Each will cry out loud enough in vague and general terms, and accuse others of extravagance, but not one of them will set to work to retrench while they have funds to keep up their extravagant expenditure. Retrenchment is only seriously set about when the total absence of money compels retrenchment. Our poverty has compelled our retrenchment, not our wisdom, our foresight, or our prudence. These have had nothing whatever to do with it. And no doubt the Premier knew quite well that the cry for retrenchment was vague and hollow, that the only sincerity about it was that the crier for retrenchment wanted to go on in exti avagance so far as his own province and self-interest were concerned, and to retrench everywhere else. In short the cry for,retrenchment was and yet is to a great extent, retrench everywhere else and anywhere except as far as regards ourselves; and so long as this hypocrisy is practised there can be no real retrenchment.

“ We must now say a word as to how the trifling duties connected with law and justice can be performed, and the expense alluded to almost entirely swept away. This would be effected by simply following the practice in England. There, unpaid justices do now, and have for hundreds of years past, done the work, to which we are alluding. Paid magistrates are a modern invention, and even at the present day are restricted to a few of the greatest centres of population. Towns in England with five times the population of this entire province have not a single paid Magistrate. Surely their magisterial business is quite as important as ours, and their wealth is as great. We believe the whole system is an entire mistake, and the sooner we revert to the good old custom that has worked so long and so well at home the better it will be for us in every respect. What country can stand such an expenditure as we have? And must log-rolling and personal interests continue until there is nothing left in the country but the log-rollers and their friends, reduced to feast on the skeleton of the carcase whose blood they sucked when living, whose bones they picked when dying.