H.—22

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the crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring for them—what is it all coming to ? If society is to be saved from breaking down under the tremendous load of degenerates in esse and posse that it will persist in carrying on the taxes we most accept the portentous significance of degeneration. We must try to grasp its rationale, and see to it that our attempts at palliation no longer are permitted to intensify the process of blunting the people's self-respect. To use taxation as we are doing—as an instrument of social reform —with any safety, we must somehow provide for the elimination of the unworthy who have become incorrigible. Otherwise the burden will become too heavy for the whole available motive-power of all the religion, all the virtue, and all the goodfellowship extant among men. It will simply leave the field clear to the predaceous demagogue. It is the old task of Sisyphus : You must alter the grade of that hill, else for ever that " shameless" stone will continue to roll back. Is it not time that, on the hustings, in Parliament, the Press, and the pulpit, this mawkish sentimentalism should be made ashamed of its imbecility ? Is there no longer extant among us enough robust manhood and common-sense to cease this sickening cant of cheap philanthrophy—cheap, i.e., to our private pockets,but insanely lavish with the taxes? As if all this were not enough, we have enfranchised woman, and it remains to be seen whether she will prove herself the apostle of common-sense amidst this abyss of insincerity and humbug. Surely they as a sex are interested in purifying the fountains of life. Must the mother always weep alone ? I used to be hopeful of the sobering effect of Direct Taxation, but now the outlook is less promising. Until we make up our minds to seclude—till they become safe —our degenerates and incorrigibles even direct taxation in the interests of the " have-nots " can only bring universal beggary. Taxation of the few by the many in their own interest is the rock ahead of our democracy, especially with our notions of tridental reform. As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people, I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the taxpayers. I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State institutions. One of the heaviest and most thankless of my multifarious duties is to resist to the best of my ability the swelling tide of pauperisation. Given on one side the full current of our vicarious philanthropy, all the believers in our sympathetic taxation, with direct access to members and Ministers by those who do not like compulsion to pay what they see their neighbours so easily get out of, and on the other a public officer of whose duty it is a mere trifling addendum that the whole onus of resistance should rest on him, and what can the democracy expect? Consider that nobody cares whether the officer collects the money or not, but that anybody who can be got at cares a great deal indeed, and takes care that he shall feel it if he is too persistent in his exactions, and who can wonder if the time be approaching when the public shall have such servants as its supineness deserves ? In all our hospitals and charitable institutions the enforcing of payment for maintenance is left to local bodies, many of whose members are full of this humanitarian zeal, while they are absolutely ignorant of the evils which attend its exercise. Many more of these members are ambitious of a public career, and utilise our charities as stepping-stones to popularity. All the inmates of our charitable institutions and all the adult recipients of outdoor relief have votes, and that, I say, is a great evil in such circumstances as ours. We have the worst possible form of administration for our charities. The local bodies are multiplied so absurdly that the ratepayers and contributors are absolutely tired of voting at the endiess elections, and their representatives are year after year elected in the most haphazard fashion. Nobody cares anything about it. I endeavoured last year, with the help of Mrs. Neill, to let in a little light on the proceedings of the Wellington Benevolent Trustees, with little effect. This year, indeed, some little care was taken to see that some contributors were present at the annual meeting besides the candidates, who for so many years past practically elected each other. Another serious evil is that these members are appointed annually. Now, universal experience proves that there is no public office where inexperience is so mischievous and its effects so terribly expensive as in dispensing public charity. Even the shrewdest and hardest-headed defenders of the public purse are unable to resist the appeals and the sights of misery, real and feigned, that come before them, and by the time they are beginning to understand a little their year is up and they mostly retire in despair. Let there be but one or two persistent men on the Board, and nothing is more certain than that, in the present comatose condition of public feeling, they, with the secretary, will get control of the whole expenditure. The evil results of such a state of things are infinite, and nobody takes the slightest trouble to even notice them. Some day the Demos will cry out in its dreams, and some poor official victim will be sacrificed to its repose. One of these evil results has often thrust itself on my attention. I mean the impossibility of enforcing any discipline whatever in these institutions. There are so many in search of a mission to secure popularity, and there is no means so cheap and effectual to this end as an agitation to expose some abuse of authority—as if it were still anywhere extant—or, if possible, something like cruelty. Any drunken old reprobate, quite incapable of truth, can easily be found to bring horrible charges against the officers. A letter or two in the papers act like a spark in a magazine, so susceptible and inflammable is our humanity, so explosive our virtue, and so cheap. Nothing short of a Boyal Commission will serve as a sop to Cerberus. I have seen dozens of them, and never one worth a penny of the money squandered on them. There is hardly a week that some Commission or other is not at work keeping up turmoil in one or other of our institutions. At a certain hospital a short time ago (one of many such experiences) I had a series of the most horrible charges made to me against the master and matron, which I took down in writing and carefully investigated, I