The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1896. WHAT THEY SAY AT HOME.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 36, 11 August 1896, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1896. WHAT THEY SAY AT HOME.

.» When the Ward catastrophe came upon the colony the first question asked was " *> hat, will they say n. Eu^iaud." A reply to that is give* by 'he ! ondon correspondent of the Uunedin Star in a letter dated London J une 26th : — Your late Treasurer's tinancial faux pas, though apparently a worse business than cablegrams at first foreshadowed, has not, so far as can be ascertained, done the colony any injury at this side Yet 4 per cents are just a trifle lower than they were, but this is attributed by the financial papers to a wave of dulness, and certainly other Antipodean stocks have also fallen. The chief mischief will now result from the impression the catastrophe appears to have given in many quarters that all New Zealand statesmen are more or less ganioiers. People have not time to distinguish between the nature of this collapse or that. "Oh ! they are ail tarred with one brush, I think," said a broker to me yesterday. " Years ago Sir Julius Yogel was what they call unfortunate ; a little later Sir Walter Buller put us all into that good thing, the New Zealand Antimony Company ; then came the scandal concerning the lion Thos. Russell Sir James Fergusson, and the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile ; and now Ward's in a mess." The Treas urer's collapse, of course, is specially unfortunate, because the City believec in him. He looked and spoke a* though he had a head on his shoulder: and could be thoroughly trusted. Il was really just because men felt " this fellow has ballast " that Ward made such an excellent impression here last year. The details here given show that the people in the Old Country have become somewhat accustomed it such "little financial episodes."