CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 71, 14 September 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

'LEACH STREET. The Borough Councillors appear to have very good grounds for their angry utterances concerning the Government's dealing with the lA'ach street business. There is a great deal of "grab," in the firstiplace, about the proposal to charge the Borough Council £205 for the little hit of land in Cover street, and the Railway Department will ]>robably wait a long time before it finds a man with the inclination to exchange so much coin of the realm for this little bit oi property, for which, by the way, the Borough Council hag no use. A more serious aspect than the actual amount asked is the method adopted by the Minister of Railways, who, after giving a definite promise to hand over the old street to the Council, now refuses to do ho unless the Council is willing to be "bled" for £2(is. It is a shuffle, a breach of promise which is very rightly compared to that of a formert'iMinister of Hail way* who promised the Borough Council and the Harbor Board to give thorn land n'enr the goods shed for the extension of Molesworth street, and who afterwards 'broke, that promise and demanded two or three thousand pounds, if we remember aright, for the land required. The Leach street story goes baok over a great number of years. When the railway came to \ew' Plymouth the Government seized on the centre, of Leach street for a railway line, and occupied the street, to the detriment of settlement in the locality,, and without paying a farthing compensation, for _ about thirty years. In order to ; avoid a bit of swampy ground, and in

order to give a landowner access which the line would otherwise have out off the Government acquired a little bit of ground at the junction of Leach and Govor street, and this was used as a street. The "round didn't cost very much in those days, certainlv not £205. .It was always understood, and the correspondence reveals that it was practically promised, that when the old railway route was abandoned Leach street would revert to the Council—a very natural course of action. But when the line had been deviated, and the Department offered for sale the lands no longer required, there arose some discussion over this little odd piece of ground at fiover street, the adjoining owner complaining that to let it pass into the hands of a private owner would do him an injury, as he had always looked upon it as a street, giving his land a frontage to Leach street. Upon certain representations being made to the Department the land was withdrawn from sale. Apparently the Department considers it lost '.C-2«5 by that, and is determined that the Council shall' 7nake good the loss. Meanwhile it refuses- to luind back to the people af New Plymouth the centre of the street which it used for so many years without charge. The Borough Councillors do well to keep a stiff upper lip in matters of this kind, and are to >be commended for protecting the ratenayors from this imposition. r ln a matter of this kind, where a public department is dealing with a public body, one might reasonably expect to s'ce 'a little elasticity in the dealings of the Department, and a stricter adherence to Ministerial promises than this wretched "red tape."

DROXES AND WORKERS. An Englishman, writing to a Xew Plymouth friend, lately said, "Mr. Llovd George's most lovable characteristic 'is his passion for humanity." Tn Britain, as elsewhere, the drones eat most of the honey brought to the hives by worker bees, or. as the Chancellor has lately said. "Multitudes, in spite of their grinding toil, did not earn enough to keep bodv and soul together, while others, who toiled not, neither did they spin, possessed a superabundance." ft is apparently inconceivable to the 2500, who. as Mr. Chizza Money had recently pointed out. own half the land in Britain, that there is anything for the person who toils from dawn to dark and from stunted youth to crippled age, to grumble at. and so, not believing in the rights of he who has nothing, they fight to keep him with nothing. Sometimes figures are illuminating. For instance, it is shown, that 700,000 persons die in a year in Britain. Of these 617,000 leave no property—their only eapital having been the work of their hands that brought them _ %ir, sub•Bistcnce, .The odd 88,000 peoplo li^ye"

three hundred million pounds! It is pitiablo but true that 4000 persons left to their heirs two hundred million pounds. By far the most pitiable pact of it is that these intolerably rich persons, as a general thing, have no conception of any duty to anybody but themselves and their own. Schemes f<ir the 'betterment of society generally for recompensing in some slight degree those who have supplied the money are extremely rare. It is commoner for the intolerably rich drone to fight like a fiend at the payment of duty on the massed wealth. It is, of course, impossible for the rich under the present system of land ownership to bo other than rich, but it remains inconceivable that millions are permitted to fester in poverty and discomfort without a sign that anything is disproportionate from the drones. The enormous increase of riches in the United Kingdom is shown eimply: 1900, £S33,000,0OO; 1!M8, £l,010.000,000—figures inconceivable in their vastness. In this period the average worker has received no more wages, but the greatest financial authorities assert that Iris living expenses have risen ten per cent.! It is indeed because the expenses arc so much greater that the taxable income of the drones has been so largely augmented. The drone resents being branded as cruel, although he is hideously cruel. He has resented fair taxation; he resents being ordered to pull down slums; he resents any organised attempts to get from biro sufficient money to adequately fill the stomachs of the people who earn it. He resents interference with hi* hitherto inalienable right to legislate for the whole community or to veto Acts that will help the underdog.

M-bi TUBERCULOSIS,

The final report of the British Royal Commission on Tuberculosis has just been published. This commission of experts, established by King Edward in 1901, has cost £730,000 for its ten years work. The questions it set out to decide were whether tuberculosis (consumption) in animals and man is one and the same, •whether animals infect man and man infect animals, in what ways animals infect man most. The report replies to these three questions. As to the first, it practically says that tuberculosis in animals and man is one and the same: "We have always found that guineapigs, chimpanzees', and monkeys are all highly susceptible to the effects of either the human or the bovine (cattle) tubercule bacillus, and that the disease produced in these animals by both types is anatomically identical. There can be no question that hiiinun tuberculosis is in part identical with bovine tuberculosis." A 9 to the second question, the report states that mammals (animals that suckle their young) and man can infect one another. "We have, conclusively shown that many cases of fatal tuberculosis in the human subject have been produced by the bacillus known to cause the .disease in cattle." Consumption of the lungs is sometimes caused by the ■bovine tubercle, bacillus. Before coming to the chief danger in diseased cows' milk and beef, the report notes that none of the animals that multiply the human tubercle are in common use for man's food, but "particular glands- of the pig's body which are likely to enter into certain prepared foods do on occasion yield tulwrele bacilli of the human type." Attention is called to the danger from the pig. The need of strict food laws is emphasised iiy the finding of the Commission and the presence of the peril of diseased milk in the case of children is the most important.