CORRESPONDENCE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2927, 25 August 1925, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

(To the Editor.)

Sir. —In a recent issue of your paper, among a list of civil cases set down for hearing at the Supreme Court at Palmerston North, appeared the following:—“Barbara Ellen Johnston v. Alfred Fraser, claim £IOSB Os 5d for amount alleged] v wrongfully taken by defendant as manager of deceased person's estate, alternatively for accounts to he taken."

Sir, in view of the wording of the above, and in common fairness to myself, may 1 ask you to kindly publish the following facts, which have not been made public:

(1) That the action was brought bv Mrs, Johnston to compel me to repay to her the amount of commission shown above (a part of which she is now apparently LEGALLY entitled to) and which was received by me for the management of the Austin Trust Estate, which position 1 voluntarily resigned on the 28th June, 1924. (2) That every penny of commission that I received (with the exception of the last three months, when it was checked by her solicitor) was each year calculated, entered and signed in the cash hook of the Estate, by her own Auditor, a Fellow Public Accountant of the New Zealand Society of Accountants.

(3) That Airs. Johnston received a Balance Sheet with the amount of commission plainly shown and signed by her own Auditor, together with his report for each of the thirteen years that I was connected with the management of the Estate.

(4) That the Auditor, in two of his earlier reports drew Airs Johnston's attention to the commission being paid for management and to which she took no exception.

Sir. ever since I left school, I have held, and do still hold, positions of trust, and Airs Johnston is the first person to east a doubt upon my honesty. However I have a perfectly clear conscience, and am gratified by tire widely expressed opinions of those who know us both, the people of Foxton, amongst whom, I have lived for the past thirty-six years. Thanking you for your kindness, Yours faithfully, ALF. FRASER.

Sir. —It is a good thing that the Welfare League takes itself so seriously—because no body else does. When I read anythin# h.v the Welfare League, I am always reminded of a ventriloquist side show — \ou hear what is said, hut you cannot see from where the words come. All honest critics are prepared to sign their names to whatever they write, hut you don't see the Welfare League writers doing that. Why? Tiiev seem to prefer obscurity. When 1 was speaking to the people of Foxton on that “famous" Sunday evening on “Labour, Religion, and Witty” I forgot to tell them, that our greatest enemies on Gallipoli and elsewhere, where the snipers who lay in obscurity and picked out our men for death. Now the Welfare League does not like “plain issues evaded," they are verv keen on “definite statements.” 1 want to ask them just two questions, not for my own pleasure, hut because the people of Foxton want to know.

Who arc the members of the Welfare League? Do they issue a balance sheet to show where their funds are obtained from?

The people of Foxton say they know who the members of the Labour Party are. and where they gel their funds from —at least, ihev are honest and straightforward. Is the Welfare League a secret society like the dreadful K.K.K. of America, which we hear so much shout ? Now sir, your correspondent can set all these tears ;ii rest by making “‘definite statement,’'' not “evading the issues. •’ I am t" glad to know that after all it is not so much (he religions aspect of the matters that is at fault, hut the land policy of the Labour Party. That is only reasonable to expect from the Welfare League, because there are no mortgages behind religion, but there are £270 millions behind the land <>l Now Zealand. The Welfare League could render im\ a very valuable “service" here, if they would! The working farmers of Manawatu have been asking me, what that 270 millions of mortgages represents? They say in a British community (and New Zealand is more British than any part of the Empire when a man pays down good money he is always supposed to gel something in return, but when they paid £BO an acre for land that was £2O acre before the war, they did not get any more, phosphates, potash, nitrogen or butt erf at! The Bankers and Farmer's Union leaders tell us that hind is only worth what it will produce, and Mr. J. D. Hall of ihe South Island says: “The land of New Zealand is valued higher than (he whole of Australia. Is that why the working farmers of Australia are putting in Labour governments, to get cheap land? Now what does that £270 millions of mortgages represent? I told them it represented the London market at 3/- lb. lmtterfat, that is what they bought, but now it was only 1/(1 Hi butterfat, and the Labour Parly was going to see that prices of land was adjusted according to its productive value and probably the Welfare League that believes in helping the producer will endorse that view! Do you now? Without “evading the plain issue,” would you be willing to help the farmer to produce more —so that we can all, honestly pay the in-

forest on our national obligations, 1 —by taking off his back that un-m-eccssary load of “paper” mortgages. Farming must be made a business proposition and all business propositions try to get their raw material as cheap as possible or else they lose the market to a competitor, that is why Siberia can produce butterfat at 4d per lb., because they got their land for nothing. (Drate those Bolvikis’ That’s another of their tricks), and now the Minister of Lands in Xew Zealand says: “There is land which it would pay the State to give away!” Fancy that! He must have been studying “Land Nationalisation” and the Third International in Moscow.

T won’t trespass any more on your space, Sir, my appeal is to the workers and working farmers of the Foxton district. I shall be over in your district again before long and shall he prepared to give a straightforward answer to any questions asked in the meantime 1 am busy working on my own farm for a living and I have no more time to answer “pifle” served up by armehair critics from Wellington. —Thanking you for your space, Yours etc. B. ROBERTS.