only have had to spend thousands this year, besides the small item of a few hundreds of thousands of acres of depopulated country?
Is it cheaper to let a man 'get dead' than to feed him or house him, on borrowed capital?
Then comes the drought; and costs us tens of millions instead of millions, to say nothing of a million or two of people who 'get dead.'
To thrust these poor remarks upon those who know it all so much better than I, and can put it so much more forcibly, seems needless.[1] This appalling
- ↑ It will, perhaps, be said that the loan system has been now adopted, and public works are no longer carried on out of current revenue only;
That the Government is no longer in the position of the old woman with the stocking;
That the principle has long since been admitted that the cost of such works should not be borne by the existing generation, which has only a life interest in them, but in the shape of interest upon public loans by succeeding generations, which will equally benefit by them.
But this is not true. Loans have been talked of, but not raised, nor sanctioned till Famine came; and now the money may be spent—not in preventing Famine, but in feeding and keeping alive some of its victims.
It will perhaps be said that for years the whole expenditure on irrigation and State railways has been defrayed from special loan funds.
But this is not so.
That the Government is open to blame for not having conceded the first sooner, and also for not having pushed forward such works fast enough, though the immense establishments which it has been necessary to organise could only have been got up by degrees.
But this is hardly true.
Why did they stop private companies from doing the work?
There has been fatal hesitation for the last three or four years,
