TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT

Allow me space in your valuable columns to express my views on “Too Much Government.” In the first place, we must be a lot of rough-necks or nonlaw-abiding people or else our Government staff is so unnecessarily large they are stumbling over one another. When we stop to think what our Government finds for all of them to do, when we consider that there is one Government employee to every eighteen or nineteen persons and only nine million of a population, no wonder we have high taxation. We are simply taxed to death and why? Because our parliament does not seem to use good judgement in making laws. In the first place their laws only benefit a few farmers in the immediate vicinity of the best cities. Take hog grading. Very few farmers are receiving any more for choice hogs than for short thick ones, and it will be the same with egg grading. Farmers close to towns or cities who have their regular customers for eggs will benefit. Those farmers are in all cases the big factors in the making of all these laws, but our Government should bear in mind that they are in the minority and not the majority, and if such laws cannot be made to benefit one and all alike we would be much better off to leave things as they were and save the expense of putting on a big staff of useless Government employees to raise taxation. Why not compel everybody to candle their eggs and always sell good eggs, under say a fine of $1.00 for the first offence and raise the fine for the second and third offence and buy and sell eggs by the pound, then the public would only be paying precisely for what they purchase and cut out a lot of useless Government expense.

Every now and then we see a large article in our daily papers about so many deserted farms in the United States, but those writers never stop to consider why it is so. How many men, both young and old, could we keep on the land here in Canada if they could earn from $5.00 to $8.00 a day in our cities? If farm produce does not rise very much higher in price than it is at the present time we will have more vacant farms here than there are across the line. There is a proof of it in so many of our young men going over there daily, not only single but married men as well. Right here, in this small locality, within the last six months, two married men and their families, and four single men have gone across the line, and why is it? Because very few farmers can pay decent wages, and they cannot get employment in our cities. Our Government should turn its attention towards getting including more manufacturing of our own products instead of sending do much of our material across the line to give employment to our Canadians over there. If more money was earned and spent in Canada in this way our boys would then stay here, but all our Government harps at is agriculture, and there are hundreds of young men who would not farm that lies out of doors. They do not like the occupation so they are driven out of our country. Our Government would sooner devote its time to hog grading and egg grading instead of something on a more gigantic scale that would improve our country materially.