TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 21100, 4 June 1930, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

It was made very plain by Mr Stallworthy on Saturday that the Department of Health is determined, if it can, to unburden itself of the St. Helens hospital system (says the Christchurch Press). The Minister admitted that there has been a heavy loss on these institutions year by year—£9ooo in Auckland last year, £7OOO in Wellington, £4OOO in Christchurch, and £4OOO in Dunedin—and in order to rid itself of that loss the Government proposes to transfer control to local hospital boards; or, in other words, to throw the burden upon the local ratepayer. The Government is so determined to do this that the Minister did not hesitate on Saturday to disparage the Department’s own work, and to suggest that there can never be efficiency until there is local control. It is true that some five years ago an agreement, more or less definite in character, was come to by the Health Department and the North Canterbury Hospital Board that the board would take over St. Helens hospital on condition that the Government provided a new building. This condition, however, has fortunately never been fulfilled, and the Hospital Board is now fully entitled to inform the Department that the agreement has lapsed. Except in Palmersion North other hospital boards do not appear to have accepted the Department’s offer of control on these or any conditions M that some form of compulsion will have to be exercised if the new policy is to be carried out. In other words, it can be carried out only if the Department decides that the St. Helens hospitals will disappear altogether unless local authorities prove willing to take them over; and it is not necessary to say what the effect of such a decision would be on the public. Meanwhile there is the still unsettled question (in Christchurch) of the hospital site, and it is astonishing that the Minister should have left it unsettled. I A striking testimony to the stability, adaptability and progressiveness of English business men has been published by the London Chamber of Commerce which has devoted a special issue of its weekly journal to a list of over 600 business houses in London, that have been established fpr

a century or' more, some of them tracing their history back to the 17th century. “If an observer in 1830 could have anticipated the revolutionary changes that were to come over England in the next hundred years,” says the journal, “he would hardly have dared to prophecy or more than a handful of those houses a lease of life extending over another century. These houses were existing in an England still essentially aristocratic, and the social revolution lay ahead, the _ gradual emergence to power of the middle and working classes; in an England whose economic life was in a state. of flux, with an amazingly rapid industrialisation already in progress, and as yet no regulation of the terrible social problems it had created; in an England largely self-supporting, an England possessing a high and comprehensive protective tariff, and the advent of Cobden was only a few years ahead; in an England finally, whose transport still ranged itself primarily about the horse, and the great era of the railways was already opening out. The fact of the survival of these houses through this revolution in every branch of the country’s life is something more than mere chance. Had the nineteenth century been relatively static their continued existence would still have been remarkable; in a hundred years in which there have been crammed such incredible changes in the whole basis of life, it seems almost miraculous that to-day they should still be very much alive. It argues intense vitality and true adaptability; it argues further, since the changes this period brought have so many of them been mechanical, an appreciation of the possibilities dormant in inanimate things. The men who controlled these business houses must have been able to visualise the practical significance of each development as it appeared, or they could never have survived such changes and turned them to their advantage.”