TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3044, 14 November 1908, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

PENNY POSTAGE. Penny postage between England and the United States was . inaugurated on October Ist, amid a good deal of enthusiasm. The adoption of the penny rate instead of the twopencehalfpenny rate is estimated to involve a loss of nearly £IBO,OOO a year to each Government, but this estimate does not take into account the increase in the number of letters. Judging from the figures for Canada and Australia, the increase should be large. The following show the expansion in letters from the United Kingdom to Canada: —

Letters and Postage. Postcards. 1898 ... 2Jd per \oz 3,023,250 1899 ... Id per £oz 3,593,100 1906 ... Id per £oz 10,788,000

The figures for the business from Canada to the United Kingdom arelß9B, 1,953,000; 1906, 7,854,000. Those for the letters from the United Kingdom to Australia, etc., are:—l9o4, 2Jd per Joz; 10,270,000; 1905, Id per £oz, 11,570,000; 1906, Id per £oz, 12,740,000. In ten years the number of letters sent from the United Kingdom to the United States has arisen from 11,000,000 to 20,000,000. THE NATIONAL VOTE. The most comforting feature of Mr Asquith's speech at the Guildhall Banquet was his emphatic declaration that "people of Great Britain hold with unshaken unanimity that the

maintenance, unquestioned, and un-

questionable, of our command of the seas is the best safeguard of our national existence and the peaceful intercourse of mankind." Amid his sanguine expectations of an industrial recovery, his declaration that the Imperial Government regards the Berlin Treaty as unalterable without the consent of the signatory Powers, "especially of Turkey," his protestations ot goodwill to every nation on earth, to "Germany not less than the others," this renunciation of any idea of reducing naval strength strikes the national one. It has been openly charged that a strong party in the British Cabinet advocates naval reduction, and only a few weeks ago there seemed every reason to fear that it was gaining the upper hand. But recent events, including the extraordinary statements of the German Kaiser, have reminded the English people that the navy is not only their first line of defence, but their only line.

FACILITIES FOR EDUCATION. At the ceremony in connection with the opening of the Auckland Training College, the Minister for Education quoted figures to show how the training of teachers had fared in the Dominion during periods past and present. In 1879, he said, £7,000 had been voted for training colleges. In 1880 the amount of the vote had been increased to £7,500, and in 1882 to £B,OOO. In that year more or less complete schools had bee.~ established in Auckland, and at Wellington in 1887, when the cry for retrenchment was at its height, the whole vote had beeu cut off, and as a consequence the normal schools in Auckland and at Wellington had to be closed. In Canterbury and in Otago the education boards determined to carry on their schools, modifying their arrangements so as to reduce the expenses and makirig arrangements to meet this out of their ordinary capitation for school purposes. Then the vote re-appeared in the modest figure of £SOO, and was increased the next year to £6OO, to £1,003 in 1900, and to £1,500 in 1902. stored to £B,OOO, as allowed in 1887, and it had been increased until this year it exceeded £25,000. The cost of training in New Zealand was not high. In Chicago, for instance, the cost was £49 each per annum, excluding the cost of the practising schools, no allowance being made to the students for board, etc. In New Zealand the corresponding cost was £23.