No. 1.

By Samuel Vaile.

We complain, and not without cause, of commercial and financial depression, but few, very few, of us take the least trouble to search out the underlying evil that has brought this state of things about.

When a large commercial house fails, numerous smaller businesses must fail in consequence, and the larger the transactions of the house that fails first, the more widespread the disaster.

We most of us remember the consternation, disasters, and trouble that followed the failure of the Glasgow Bank. We have a mild example nearer home. Our local bank is not as prosperous as it used to be. No one able to judge doubts its ability to regain its former position; but in the meantime we feel the effects of shaken confidence.

What placed the Bank of New Zealand in its present position? Incapacity, or worse, on the part of its management and directors, say Mr. Buckley and others. I hold a totally different opinion, and believe that the Bank's difficulties have arisen chiefly from causes outside of itself and beyond its control. They arise from the failure of a still larger concern.

Those who have managed the affairs of the Bank have no doubt made serious mistakes, but these would not have been felt had not the value gone out of country lands to such an extent that the owners were compelled to abandon them to the Bank, and the Bank directors have been unable either to realise or utilise them. It was never thought that the Bank would have become the owner of these properties. This loss of value is due to maladministration of public affairs.

What is the chief business of any country? Is it not its public business, the administration of its Government; and are we not all convinced that for years past this has been a serious failure? And why has it been a failure? Simply because it has become a fashion with the leading men of ail classes to say that a business man ought not to take any part in politics, and thus public affairs have been allowed to drift into the hands of inferior men, and our merchants and others have gone on "minding their own business" till now they have very little business of any kind to mind.

If this country, or, indeed, any country, is ever to be really prosperous, its citizens must recognise the fact that, from the highest to the lowest, we all have public as well as business and private duties to perform, and that if we neglect public duties, private interests must necessarily suffer.

Of all the departments of our public business there is not one that exercises so great and immediate an influence for weal or woe as the department of working railways.

In it we have invested £15,000,000 of capital, or considerably over £24 per head for every man, woman, baby, imbecile, and gaolbird in the country. This, then, next to the whole public business, is the largest concern in the colony. It is purely a business department. Alongside of it the Bank of New Zealand is merely a baby. The Bank's capital is but £1,000,000; the railway capital is £15,000,000.

The Bank is not prosperous, and the country suffers in consequence. But what influence can this have compared with the failure of our railway department? I do not suppose there is an individual in the colony who has bestowed the least thought on the subject but what knows, and feels, that the administration of our railways is a complete, an absolute, and most contemptible failure.

The most ardent advocates of the present system cannot pretend that in any respect it has been a success. The one object has been to "get revenue," and here it has failed miserably. As a means for settling the country it is a still worse failure, while as regards the transportation of goods, and providing facilities for the travelling public, the whole colony loudly complains.