Hard Times.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 124, 30 April 1885, Page 3

Hard Times.

(The '• Wanderer " m Hawera Star.) With the necessaries of life, such as bread, meat, sugar, groceries, and articles of cothing, at a lower price than ever was known j-with the timber and building material, or house rent, at as reasonable a figure as anyone could expect ; and with wages at a fair rate— m fact as high as ever— how comes it that we hear the incessant din of dull and hard tunes ? Go. to Nqrmanby or Mania, and m each of those small towns there are three hotels. What do the persons who patronise these hotels get for their investment? Luxuries, not necessaries, surely? Take Hawera, that borough of pubs., and which is yet to have another imposed upon her ; thousands of pounds annually thrown iirfo the ocean of a will. Or visit the racecourse and behold the eager fanatics who Holdout the crumpled pound notes, anxious to place their own or, may be, other people's money on a horse on the totalisator, with the..mere chance of that particular horse first catching the judge's eye, so that they may make a haul of other people s losings. Or look at our steady- going settler friends ; what are many doing' Adding acre to acre, mortgage to mortgage. ' A man with a few score acres of Jaud encumbered with a mortgage of a few hundred pounds, is not satisfied until he has a large estate with thousands of pounds encumbrance by way of rnortgaffes, with increased cares and diminished profits. And vet "the times are dull." Bah! The times are what we make them. Let us live temperately and; reasonably, enjoy the blessings.of climate, of liberal laws, of a fertile soil, with which providenpe has blessed us, and times will soon look ; rosy, and we should be a prosperous community. In the whole history of the world no people were ever so well off as we are if w.e only knew how to avail ourselves of our resources. . Tho root of the whole mat- 1 ter is for each of us to live within his incomes. A man with a hundred a year and Baring ten of it is m a more promising way than the man with a thou sand splending it all.