The Wairarapa Daily WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1891.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Issue 3866, 22 July 1891, Page 2

The Wairarapa Daily WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1891.

A meeting was held on Saturday last, in Wellington, of.members favourable to the Nationalisation of Coal Mines. The idea is to work the coal measures of the Colony for the benefit of the people, and kill a partial monopoly by instituting a whole one. There is wisdom of the usual kind talked about this project. - The masters, it is said, make colossal fortunes, the men are toiling slaves, the masters live on glutting, and even "eat and drink," (so our local contemporary says). This eating and drinking on the part of the masters is very sad. The miserable toiling masses who hew the coal at ten shillings a day, or whatever wage may be going, don't eat and. drink, these privileges being reserved for the aristocrats whom they call masters. Now, we can quite understand the indignation of our local contemporary with the upper classes who venture to eat and drink, the horror of even the member for Masterton at the assumption of prescriptive rights belonging to certain remarkable for their abstemiousness, but we cannot comprehend his further argument that coal would be bought at cost price by the people, and the cost would be ten or twelve shillings a ton less than is now paid. In the first place the present; masters who are makiDg the colossal fortunes want to sell, and the State, the moment it commenced buying, would send up the market price of coal mines by some five and twenty per cent; and put say an extra half a crown a ton for all time on the price of coal, Then the State, instead of employing slaves is to pay unionists to get out the coal | at a price to be agreed upon, and this would, we venture to say, put ten shillings a ton on to coal, and finally the coal mines worked on the nationalistic principle would not be able to compete with rival mines in Australia and would hopelessly collapse. It is gratifying to find M.H.B.'s andother J influential politicians who have demonstrated in their own careers! some incapacity for business management undertaking big ventures of this kind. A man perhaps who could not be trusted to supervise the expenditure of a hundred pounds a year with any degree of safety is prepared at a moment's notice to grasp commercial problems running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. But still it is only the privileged classes who eat and drink, and some allowance must be made for reformers who are not allowed to eat and never under any circumstances to drink. If a square meal were given to one of our M.H.R.'s, a-nd he were allowed to touch the cup that cheers, his ideas on the subject of coal measures would probably become less inflated. Is the mind of the member for Masterton and his coal mining projectors unhinged by a long Tannerlike fast and by an inability to drink ?