CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 220, 28 December 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

-WHAT CHRISTMAS MEANS,' The man who believes that the whole of Christendom "takes a .spell" at Christmas and New Year time, oughtto stray into a large post office, where he will not be welcome. People on an average despatch double their usual mail matter during the Christmas holiday time. If a postal official of any grade fails to feel the joy of the festive season, nobody will blame him, for while ah the world- and his wife sample the joys of the season he lives in a whirl of letters, postcards, Christmas cards, parcels and perspiration. One of the sights of any of the New Zealand centres at this time of the year is to see the detachments of letter carriers emerge from the offices, loaded like pack-horses. In the offices the whole staffs, with the necessary additions, have to work like fiends to keep ahead of the quantities of Christmas greetings that pour in on S em. To those who give the matter a ought, it must seem wonderful that the sudden increase of postal business at Christmas time is handled just as rapidly and effectively as at normal is an invigorating sight to see the General Post Office trying to satisfy the people With the English Christmas mail. It is necessary to carefully police Wellington Post Office Square to keep the people from pushing headquarters over. Barriers are frequently erected, and inside the office perspiring officials shoulder to shoulder push joy messages into outstretched hands as fast as possible. The public expect every postal official to to be the soul of courtesy on these occasions, and to answer any question within the scope of the Postal.Guide. The assistant postmaster at headquatrers lately said that postal officials expected double work at Christmas time. Instead of the usual fifty bags of mails on a recent day there were 90 bags. Ordinarily the Sydney mail brings five thouasnd letters. The last mail brought ten thousand. If the excess of business in every other Government department at Christmas were as great, Christmas and New Year would be popular institutions.

ARE THEY RUN AT A PROFIT? The Wellington Dominion questions whether the railways are run at a profit, and says "that the net revenue per train mile, "the proper measure" of the value of the' lines, "calculated to the nearest pound," shows that during the first tbirty-two weeks of. the financial year the North Island section paid £278 per mile and the South Island section £lO5 per mile. The Lyttelton Times has been looking /up the latest Commonwealth Year Book, and finds that the Australian railways, which the Dominion is always, holding up to New Zealand as an example to be followed, have never paid more than 3s I'd per mile over a whole year, and during the last year for which particulars are given paid only 2s lOd per mile. In 1906-7 the New South Wales lines paid as much as 3s 5d per mile, but that figure has never been touched since, and all the returns in the Commonwealth, tested by this "proper measure," show a tendency to decline. The Times thinks that probably the Dominion intended to refer to "the §iet revenue per average mile worked," which,is, of course, quite a different thing and accepted nowhere as a proper measure of the value of a railway unless interest .on the cost of construction is deducted from the earnings.. This is. not done in either , the Australian or the New Zealand returns. But even if the revenue is tested in this fashion we do not find the New Zealand lines comparing very unfavorably' with those of Australia. In 11)08-9 the net revenue per average mile worked in the Commonwealth was £398 per mile. During the first thirty-two weeks of the current financial year the revenue in New Zealand was nearly £230 per mile, and if the improvement in the earnings should continue through the, remaining twenty weeks it will reach by the end of tlu twelve months rather more than £490 per mile. Whichever "proper measure" the Dominion cares- to take, the result will be conclusively against its contention that commissioner management in Australia is doing better' than ministerial management in New Zealand.