TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIX, Issue 8149, 25 May 1906, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

Speaking at a meeting in Timaru recently, Mr W. S. Masiin made a strong protest against the bill to be introduced next season by Mr PallJones, providing for tbe eleotion of Hospital Boards on the Parliamentary franohise. Mr Masiin said that the bill would mark a retrogade step. The cost of the election would be largely increased, and there would not be the same tendenoy to economy as there is now in the expenditure of the ratepayers' money. There would be less efficiency, and there was a possibility, if not a strong probability, tnat expenditure would be carried on regardless of where the money was tci come from. The potentialities of this bill were great, and it was of great importance that some reoommendation should be sent to tbe Government concerning it. A committee of the Ohio Legislature which had beeu investigating the charges of corruption in Cincinnati and Hamilton County during tbe Cox regime, has made tne startling discovery that Cox collected on an average about seven million dollars a year—an income whish. capitalised on the ordinary merger taais,* would have enabled him to incorporate himself as a Boodle Trust with a capital of something like one hundred and fifty million dollars. The estimate of Cox's illicit revenue was made by County Treasurer R. K.Hynicks, formerly his principal lieutenant. Several bankers testified that they had been in tbe habit of giving "gratuities" to officials of the county treasury in return for deposits of pubplic funds without interest.

The Paris journal, Le Temps, prints an exhaustive survey of the Anglo-French agreement with regard to the New Hebrides question, and also comments upon the great dissatisfaction the agreement has aroused in Australia and New Zealand. It says that it is a foregone conclusion that when the terms are fully known the two colonies will recognise that their outbreak of indignation is not only premature, but unjustifiable. Prance and England have done their best to arrange matters, and it is absurd for Australia and New Zealand to suppose that if they only cry loud enough both France and England will hastily drop the whole business. If Australia and New Zealand want a condominium? they can have it, and if they want a division they can have it also; and it may be added, as far as France is oouoerned, that she would prefer a division. In any case France has far more rights and itnerests in the New Hebrides tbaa any other Power, and whether Australia and New Zealand like it or not, she intends to have those interests properly safeguarded.

St. Helena, that lonely fragment of an ancient volcano, is to be allowed to keep her little garrison of British troops for 12 months lunger. She can ill afford to lose any part of her population, for the allurements of. an Atlantic residence 1,200 miles from the nearest continent are not overpowering. Perhaps, however, if it were generally known that St. Helena had no public debt its popularity as a fashionable watering place might rise to the level of 1899, when the Boer warriors built up their shattered constitutions under the influence of ts healthy olimate. For the palmy days of the island one mußt go baok to the time when the Suez Canal was unheard of, and vessels bound to and from India made it a port of call, and filled the pockets of the islanders with gold. Now they are driven to the harder, if more exciting industry of hunting the

whalef and cultivating the potatopursuits which maintain in decent comfort a community of something Ike 5,000 people.

Half in jest, and half, perhaps, in remembrance of the late Lord Salisbury's "circus in every village," Mr Rider Haggard has proposed a new remedy for rural depopulation. He was speaking at the first annual meeting of the Co-opera-tive Small Holdings Society, and referred to his reoent visit to the United States as Government Commissioner sent to report on the Salvation Army colonies. During that visit he was informed by Mr Wilson, the Secretary of State for Agriculture, that in several districts they had actually succeeded in stopping the exodus from the country into the towns—an exodus whioh was puzzling Americans as well as Englishmen. They had solved the diffioulty, and kept the men on the laDd, by fixing up a telephone in every house. The women no longer sighed for the amusements of the town; after their work was done tbey gossiped to each other over tne telephone. Mr Haggard threw out the suggestion that, in order to make the village life more attractive, the American example might well be copied in England. Writing to the Daily News under the heading "Wihy the Kaffir Rebels," Mr W. B. Jameson says: —"Formerly New Zealand was garrisoned by British troops. At that time the colonists were constantly at war with the Maoris. Then, owing to the refusal of the colonists to contribute towards the cost of the British garrison, the troops were withdrawn by the Home Government, and the colonists were left to their own resources for protection against the natives. The immediate consequence was that the entire policy and attitude of the New Zealand colonists towards the Maoris i underwent a change. War, hitherto constant, oeased, peace ensued, and i has never since been broken. In Natal the handful of white colonists J are baoked up ifa their anti Kaffir ! policy by a British garrison. Encroachment on native rights is re- ! sented by the Kaffirs, and their resentment is repressed by estab- ; lishtuent of martial law and drumh«ad courts-martial, presided over by militia officers, whose competence or judicial-mindedness is far from being an established fact. Withdraw the Britisn garrison, and henceforth let the peace and security of the colonists depend on their pursuance of a pacific and just policy towards the Kaffirs, and the present trouble will vanish." 1 need hardly point out to New Zealand readers, says a London correspondent, the gross unfairness and inaccuracy of these statements so far as New Zealand is concerned