NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1046, 21 September 1911, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

“ I consider the rating on the unimproved value is the only fair and equitable method of taxation,” said a Buunythorpe farmer to a Manawatu Standard reporter. 11 Here am I paying over £9 for under fifty acres, just because I have a snug homestead, and have spent money in making my home pretty and comfortable, I pay at the rate of 3s yd per acre. Now, take some of the big estates. I could specify one of nearly four thousand acres, and the rates do not come to nine-pence per acre, or about one fifth of the amount per acre that I have to pay. Now and again an effort has been made to change the rating principle to the unimproved value, but the other system still remains. The more I improve the higher is my valuation, and the higher are my rates. Does that encourage the small farmer to improve his property ? It will always be so so long as the rating principle remains as at present.”

Addressing the. Sydney Optimists’ Club recently, Professor Macmillan Brown, of Christchurch, told the story of his conversion to optimism. He began life with chronic indigestion, and he had more than a decade of chronic sleeplessness, but he got clear of both of these, and he was now completing his education. There was no better prescription to put one on the true road to optimism than to become the familiar friend of a little child. There was always a “Dismal Jimmy” about the neighbourhood. He had always got a new ache or ailment or worry. Professor Brown decried the disposition to hold up the peccadilloes and foibles of one’s neighbours to the public gaze, and said that if people were only to cast their minds back over the things that worried them ten mouths ago they would find out of how little consequence they were. Optimism, if it had not good common-sense, became sheer, slovenly, slouching Micawberism. The pessimists said that God was not in heaven, and that everything was evil. He (Professor Brown) felt inclined to think that there was a pessimist in the Garden of Eden. The first recorded pessimist was he who thought that his brother had a great monopoly of the things of this world.