The Hawaiian Star

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1900.

HEAVY ITEMS.

When the total amounts to be expended are footed up, as they are done in another column, the footings are sufficient to appall one. Where is the money to come from? Our revenue won't reach anything like this sum. Our borrowing powers will be very much limited by the new organic law. It looks as if the Council voted appropriations and let chance take care of whether they could be paid or not. Then when one comes to think that all this mass of money was voted under the plea of emergency, by a body not strictly entitled to vote it, without the people, who will have to find the money, having any voice in the matter, one certainly opens one's eyes at the bravery of the members of the Council. They certainly have not been modest in their demands upon the public purse. The question comes up whether the whole set of bills will not be reversed as soon as possible after our territorial status comes into being, which should be somewhere about June 10. The territorial legislature will have to be called together, and that will have to consider ways and means from an entirely different standpoint than that which the Council of State has taken. Had we not been obliged to pour out money like water in fighting the plague we should have had a good substantial balance to meet the changed conditions. That is what Mr. Damon as Minister of Finance, hoped for. But his hopes were frustrated and the balance is pretty well gone. We are therefore in not nearly so good a position as we hoped to be. But this can be overcome comparatively easily, but the method of overcoming it is certainly not that mapped out by the Council of State which has proposed to spend more, considerably, than the national income.