The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 1919 BACKBLOCKERS, BEWARE!

Taihape Daily Times, 6 January 1919, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 1919 BACKBLOCKERS, BEWARE!

(With waica is tncorpoiated Th* ffcihape Poat cad flr«.les»il'i«> News).

From the very seldom mention of the subject of roads and bridges in sessions of Parliament during the last few years one might conclude that the needs of the country had just about been exhaustively met in that connection. The back-blocks men who furnish the millions that Government spends wisely and otherwise view the great steam horses as they rush along for the convenience of middlemen and parasites in the great cities with a mixture of envy and hopelessness. For a quarter of a century backblocks men have worked to delve out that upon which cities can only become great, and when these men, who are still backblocks, view the vast accumulations of wealth represented in bricks, stone, and mortar with all their costly modern embellishments and appendages they marvel at the stupidity of their class in allowing so much to be taken from the sweat of their brow while they still work on with only an indifferent road, and with absolutely no postal or telegraphic service; only a few miles from a postal centre, and yet the letter carrier or mailman is not known around their habitations. In days gone by Parliament fairly rang with demands for opening up the country, for roads and bridges and for letter servces, so much so that "roads and bridges" became bywords. A member of Parliament who realised that all wealth came from the land and there-

fore strove to have land made as accessible as possible was honoured with the soubriquet of "a roads and bridges , man."' To-day the roads and bridges | man is* extinct, or nearly so; the needs of the backblocks settler are so rarely mentioned in parliamentary debates that one would think he had no needs; , that he was happy and content, a clearheaded Government having furnisned I him with good roads, good mail service | and good schools. The backblock settler has very few champions in present day Parliaments; anything is good enough for him; he is of very little importance economically in comparison with the city magnates, and that litfle is still of the vanisihng character. Those men who take the backblocker's produce, rail it, ship it, and arrange its marketing; those who look after his money for him, and those who supply him with the necessaries of backblock life, together with an army of clerks and packers, must have huge palatial railway stations and general post offices, which mop up millions of pounds which the backblocker fairly dragged from the soil. Those things the city man cannot leave tho backblocker without, such as fencing wire, nails, axes, and farm implements, lose importance from the moment they leave the city merchant's hands to the moment they arrive at where possession is taken. At the city end there is a surplusage cf post office accommodation and a surfeit of post office messengers and letter carriers to get the merchant's letters of advice away; at the other end those letters lie in some country post office until roads become passable, or some important farm work is completed that would have involved considerable loss to leave unfinished, work that could not wait while the farmer wasted a day going into town merely to sec whether there were any letters for him. When he does go to the post office he enquires if anything in the post office line is there for him, and if the unfortunate clerk makes no error in sorting he gets the merchant's missive that left the city amidst lavish servitude. The merchandise goes through a similar process; at the city end there are railway services to the acme of perfection, at the backblocker's end there may be a notification lying at the post office for weeks advising him that if goods addressed to him are not removed he will be charged storage from a date that is already in the past. If the goods are of considerable weight he has no other aiternatime than to engage somebody to cart them to his farm, or to travel home and return the nexa day with his own conveyance. "Roads and bridges" was the cry of practical men who realised that without both there could be only a miserable imperfect use made of the land. To-day, the cry is "Pro luption and still more production." It used to be "Settlement and still more settlement unit! 'it became to be realised to be nothing more than a hollow sham;; until a ruinous, disastrous oolicv of aggression left districts depopulated, farm houses falling into decay and schoolhoiises that settlers had

•helped to build were left without either a teacher or a pupil, to rot. There does not appear to be suffiiceiit reflection in Parliament to recognise that the huge wave of commercialism, the palatial commercial institutions, the palatinates of finance in our cities cannot go on for ever on borrowed millions; they will be thrown back on what the backblocks man produces sooner or later; but what does it all mean; what is the scourge the backblocks man is making for himself? 'As millions can no longer be borrowed and a crippled production I through neglect ceases to furnish the j gold to keep the great institutions go- | ing, will some of them close down, will parasitical or useful establishments undergo any process of curtailment? Not at all, and the backblocker "vvko thinks they will is verily a fool. TSe men who conduct the exchanging and •trading houses will bring about what they call an appreciation of the currency. Which in stone-cold language means that the backblocker Ins to j allow the money changer and the mer- j chant and the parasitical middleman to j take 'a higher percentage out of what he produces; lie will have to pay a higher rate of interest, and he will have to pay a much higher price in produce for everything he needs to j buy: his stock and produce will realise j much lower prices and his land will considerably recede in value. A serious appreciation of money is the most direful happening to the man who works on the land; it is as though the whole category of calamities that can befall the producer has come upon him at once. Money that is stored represented by gold, truly termed concreted labour, no longer in the hands and possession of the producer, is, by the will of money-changers and traders, made to be worth much more than the labour the producer has to give. The very last straw that can be laid upon the backblooker's back is the turning cr public services, instituted by the public for the public into profiteering concerns. While the men'who take from nature by the sweat of their brows the essence of life, progress, happiness and contentment, profligate government Is making huge profits out of post offices, railways, and other public services, while, if they want a mail servicei once ! or twice a week they must pay directly j from their pockets for it by way of ! subsidization or pig on without it. Our j desire is to rouse backblockers to realj ise that by far the greatest portion of I the money spent on the great war has filtered into the hands of shippers, traders and money-changers, who are ! very busy at this minute cozening pro-! ducers into the belief that there will | be no increase in money values. There j is already the advent of lower prices i in the drop in skin and hide values, j There is every indication one could j wish for that there will be no lessening of demand for all this country has to produce for some years to come, but we regret to say there "is some ; evidence that money is to appreciate which, if anything, is a greater disaster than a. fall in values, as in addition to adversely affecting the producer it must further accentuate the labour question as, primarily, the only work j worth while is that of production. Trading institutions of farmers "ancl Government public services which have recently developed into profiteering concerns are useful to an extreme' if ! used legitimately, but the backblocker must not allow himself to be cajoled into believing that wealth arises therefrom regardless of production. This country urgently needs a resurrection of the old-time roads and bridge? men to rescue the country's production from the swamp in which high finance, commercialism and Government profiteering concerns are hopelessly over- | whelming it. !