THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JULY 27, 1909. STATE RESPONSIBILITY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9552, 27 July 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JULY 27, 1909. STATE RESPONSIBILITY.

The claim of the Manukau Countv Conference that tha Government should pay compensation for damage done fay fires caused by sparks from railway engines is ore which will be endorsed by every agricultural dis trict and should be supported by al who hold that equity should goveri the relations of the State and it citizens. Were the railways in thi hands of private corporations there would be no question as to legal re sponsibility, for farmers and other. would be able to sue for damage under the common law. But thi State, assuming the railway monopoly, carefully divested itself of thi legal* responsibilities elsewhere at taching to the railway business ant senJs its locomotive sparks int< fences, hay fields, ricks, buildings, and plantations, with the comfort able knowledge that no sufferer ha: a legal remedy. A variety of reasons have been advanced by the Government, in justification of its exemption from responsibility, wheneve: the matter has been brought before Parliament, and the strange lack of syrrpathy with agricultural grievances usually 'displayed by city members, has prevented redress. It has been urged that the government would always lose in the Law Courts and would thus be plundered in a wholesale manner if it accepted a legal responsibility for engine-caused fires; and it has been argued that to make the State libel for damages set by a Law Court would be to violate the right of Parliament to hold the public purse strings. These are the leading objections raised by the champions of State irresponsibility: their hollowness is evident. The King's Government should be the very last to question the arbitration of the King's Courts and the King's judges; and the Railway Department could easily insure itself in the State or any other Insurance Office against any leeal responsibility. In several Australian States the Railway Departments have not been rendered immune against such actions for damages, yet the skies do not fall; and all over the world private railway corporations must answer any plaintiff in the Court yet they do not £o out of business. In this Dominion, however, there is an insidious and perilous'tendency to withdraw from the control of laws any business into which the State may enter. In this case the farmers suffer, int because the State could not meet »vith ease any legal claim, were it nade responsible, but simply be:ause it is a bureaucratic dogma :hat Departmental business should lot be subject to the civil law. As l/Ir Maasey said, if a farmer's crop is ired by a traction engine he can ob. I

tain compensation, but if it ig fired by a railway engine he cannot. This is wrong. It ia not merely undemocratic; it is unjust, tyrannical and inequitable, whatever the form of government. It causes considerable loss and constant anxiety to the farmers along the railway lines. It would be remedied unhesitatingly by an indignant public opinion had a great section of the public not been hypnotised into the brief that the agricultural community is always seeking to take some mysterious advantage of the xest of the population and to defeat the benevolent inten tions ot the best of all possible Govei-nments