THE BUT ABOUT BUTTER

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2176, 14 September 1920, Page 3

THE BUT ABOUT BUTTER

If hut tor were a compound that, we didn’t use"ourselves we should he very glad to see the producers getting anything up to 5s a pound tor it. or perhaps more, hut —. And that is just where the trouble comes in. We all draw nutriment from (he patient cow, from the puling infant lu the septuagenarian, and when we read in the papers that halter is aboul to lake wings and soar, the prospect giddies ns. \\ e know very well that the more money the hnt-tcr-man gels from outside, the more lie will have to spend in the shops, warehouses and motor garages, and that his prosperity will inevitably spread to us. Moreover, wc arc forced to realise that the man who milks cows for a living is a harder worker ami a more useful, and therefore honourable citizen, than we can possibly he. lie is up with the lark and home with the owl, am' is tied lo the byre seven "days a week, while other people are holidaying. We all know that, and yet we find it very hard to be reconciled to 2s 10d per- II). for hut ter. And yet there is this about it, that we "can" get butler a price, while I he men and women and babes in the far Home conn try are lucky if they can secure a couple of ounces a week of litis precious and nutritious food. If seems more than a little indecent Hmt some of us should be driven to rejoicing ul the news that (hey are “starving fur huller” at the other end of the world, 'bit the thing that concerns us most is that we in a laud of plenty should have In pay famine prices for a product made at our own doors. The cow owner has his end of the ease, of. courrie. Tie is squeezed from the other side. In an ideal world the lest of the land-ownership would he use —and Use alone. But no, we let tlie land speculator in and we allow him to prey upon the producer. Land becomes dearer —millions are “made" by “deals” in land: the freeholder “retires,’' and the lessee and the share-milker, and the industrious young settler with the big, big bogey on his back, gets in at the liasv end of the job, with one eye on the pail and the other furtively uplifted in the hope that somebody even more optimistic than himself will suddenly arrive and buy him out. Meanwhile the cost of everything goes up to the eow-milker; labour, stock, wire, horse-shoes, farm utensils, building material, clothing, everything goes up. And the more they go up the harder he has to squeeze. We know all this in the back of our licad>, and yet we resell I having to pay 2s Hbl per lb. when we know that It is not "worth" 2> ,l.l)d per Hi. —to.us. Mow everybody is waiting to see wlmt Mr Massey is going to do about it —at least we pretend that yve are wailing to sec —we know! Mr Massey, who after all is only a human being, is going to do what he did before; he

is going to “fix” the price of lap ter to local consumers, by the simple process of lifting (id or Sd or Is out of Bill Smith’s left-hand pocket (the Consolidated Fund) with which to “equalise prices," and Mien he will “make” the eow-milker place his product on the market at a lower rate. The buHerman will, of course, go on squealing that he is being “robbed," and will persist that he is “the victim" of “tyranny,” and is being deprived of the “free market” for which his soul yearnedh, and the whole thing will end as all such things end-—as they were before. It does not help ns to realise the truth of the situation —that in reality we are struggling in tiie net of circumstances together hut it lias this value, that it has a tendency to make us philosophical —and without philosophy life itself would hardly seem worth while.-—Palmerston Times. „