STATE STEAMERS.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1916, Page 4

STATE STEAMERS.

The Prima Minister has explained that he was looicing far ahead when he referred to State-owned 20,000-ton steamships, running at twenty knots between New Zealand and Great Britain. He is not planning the establishment of such a service in the immediate future, and does not propose to acquire the fleet of the Union Company or any other shipping concern. This statement disposes of a misapprehension that seems to have arisen in London, but one may trust that it does not close the subject. Indeed, when the war ia over and the political truce has ceased to hobble State enterprise, we ought to hear a great deal of State shipping, which must have a direct bearing on the future of the Empire. "We people of the British Empire need to get together,'' writes Mr. Stephen Graham. "We have to make bridges to Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India. We need the Government to institute a State service of steamboats between the colonies and the Motherland; not try to make them pay, but to make of them public bridges between our far-off lands and ourselves. It should be possible for a Britisli subject to go anywhjere in the British Empire at a fare of about £l, and pay for meals as wanted according to tariff. . . , We have got to make journeys on the sea unimportant and ordinary. We diminished the cost of postage from a shilling to a penny in order that there might be a greater circulation of personal opinion and intelligence, and we had great gain. It is all to our advantage, and much more to our advance, to increase the circulation of the people of our Empire ty removing the prohibitive prices that we have to pay in order to cross from one land to another." This ideal may be as difficult of realisation as Mr. Henniker Hcaton's scheme of penny-n-word inter-Imperial cablegrams, but its attractions cannot be denied. The real key to Imperial federation may be foi'-i in communication and transport.