CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 207, 10 December 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

HOLDING THE KEY. From the results of the British elections already to hand, it seems probable that the Nationalists will again dominate Parliament. In the November Fortnightly, a journal of great standing and influence in England, Mr. .7. L. Garvin (editor of the Observer, a Liberal weekly) shows how Irishmen hold the key of the political situation, and not merely the Irish Irishmen. but the Irishmen in all parts of the Empire and .the United States. ''There is no possibility of a permanent treaty of arbitration between the British Empire and the American Republic while the 'lrish question remains on its present footing," he writes. "To place it on a different footing has become one of the chief needs of our foreign policy. Further, we have to reckon with the sentiment of the self-governing dominion. In one way or another the existing state of the relations between Great Britain and Ireland makes them all uncomfortable. Their chief statesmen of various political parties in Canada, Australia, and South Africa alike, are full either of Irish sympathies or of Irish blood, or both. They •will have nothing to do with any definite ; scheme of Imperial Union while the worki ing of the Imperial Parliament is obsessed and perverted by the over-representa-tion of an unreconciled race. To the dominions our dealing with this question in the twentieth century, in spite of the immense changes of the last twenty years in every single aspect of our policy, external and internal, seems to be madness. Mr. Redmond and his friends have intimated, publicly and privately, that they desire autonomy not on the model of a practically coordinate State like Canada, but on the model of a great Canadian province like Quebec, where federalism provides for a sub-nationality, French in race and Catholic in religion, while at the same time promoting the unity of the Dominion as a whole. In six months more we shall be approaching the Coronation. Simultaneously the meeting of by far the most critical Imperial Conference yet held must go far to determine and may absolutely determine whether Imperial Union is to remain possible or to become hopeless. For a hundred years the whole problem of defence has not been so grave and urgent. Even Unionists hitherto reluctant to race some realities of modern democratic politics now perceive that if the Socialist struggle for control of all industry and property is to be successfully resisted, social reform will have to be mdre resolute and comprehensive than most sympathetic thinkers on that subject had hitherto ventured to dream. The Portuguese revolution, the danger in Spain, the French railway strike, the Moabit riots in Berlin, the vast movement of popular unrest now surging even in the United States—these are signs of a new asd perilous epoch to which no sane man can he blind. Nor let any confused mind attempt the crude argument that Socialism and social reform are the same thing, afid that to advocate the latter is only promote the former under another na»e. Nothing of the kind. Socialism and social reform are sharply distinguished things. To work for pulling down property and individual enterprise is one thing. It is another thing to strive to raise the lot of the poor; to promote their physical and moral and mental efficiency by every means; to seek the wiping out utterly of the worst blots upon industrial civilisation, with its weltering sloughs of dirt, disease, misery and degeneration; to lift the whole level of life sind thought among , the gassed"' *i.. , - -■■■■ j COMEDY AND RAIN. "*

Because greedy men are killing the timber on New Zealand hills, drought seasons are now more common that they used to be. They will be more frequent still in the years to come. The attempts now being made by Oamaru people to blow rain out of a blue sky with gun-cotton are pathetic in their quence. The Government is assisting in the comedy by giving the rainmakers money to .-buy guncotton with. One may allow oneself to be sorry for the dryness of Otago and yet find time to smile at. the. lilicato.ua .sfffllta'to iatoe rain. New Zealand's only hope, if it does not want to become an alternately droughtstricken and flooded country, is to reafforest its hills. Trees are Nature's preventive of floods and her insurance against drought. Even in Australia, where the timber destroyer is more virulent and idiotic than elsewhere —for he just kills it and lets it stand—the people are finding that droughts follow ringbarked areas. Quite a lot of Taranaki folk laugh at the person who suggests the continental idea of a "third of a farm in trees," but if one-half of the dry area of the South were in trees, foolish persons, abetted by the Government, would not now be trying to shoot damp <}f the heavens with guncotton.

AMERICA'S REMARKABLE BILL. An obscure clause in the Australian Defence Bill provides that the State shall be liable for the payment of pensions to Commonwealth soldiers and sailors who may be incapacitated by injuries received in time of war. The proposal is entirely reasonable, of course, but it is interesting to remember what has been the result in the United States of a too_ liberal interpretation of a similar provision. Half a century has elapsed' since the close of the American Civil War, and the republic is paying more than £30.000,000 every year to people who allege that they were connected, directly or indirectly, with the armies in the field. The most extraordinary feature of the situation is that the pension bill is allowed to grow steadily. A year after the cessation of hostilities the United States Government was paying pensions at the rate of £3,000,000 a year to disabled soldiers, widows, orphans and other dependants. In 1874 the pension bill reached: £0,000,000. Five years later a law was passed giving full arrears to all those entitled to pensions, and within two years a total annual charge of £12,000,000 had been created. The bill attained a total of £31,000,000 in 1007, and in. the following year Congress enacted legislation that brought the total up to £33.000,000. Natural causes will bring about a reduction this year. "But in the last Congress," says the World's Work, "more daring legislation was proposed, and all the machinery of the pension organisation and all the Grand Army influence have been set to work to secure from the next session laws that will push the pension bill up to heights never before dreamed of." The American people can afford to be extravagant, but many of them would like to know what really becomes of all this pension money. Australasians should be careful to avoid all possibility of placing themselves in a similar predicament.